Network test-driven development

[Michael Kashin]

Hi,

,Just wanted to share my take on network testing automation. I had this problem when every time I made a routing change to a complex network I had to manually do traceroutes between different pairs of devices verifying the correct path and traffic symmetry. So I decided to automate it in a TDD/BDD-like fashion. I'd write traffic scenarios in a human-readable format like 

From A to B via C,D

 and then verify those scenarios using Ansible with a few custom modules. So now I use it whenever I do a design (these scenarios go verbatim into a detailed network design document) or network upgrade. For anyone interested, I have the code on github https://github.com/networkop/simple-cisco-tdd  and an example of how TDD methodology can be applied in networking.