OpenEMR on ECS and ECS have both recently acquired test suites that run against an emulated AWS environment using the Floci library which creates an emulated AWS environment to allow developers to test operations without needing to spend the time or money required when doing live testing with AWS resources.
The test suites aimed to cover as much of the projects as I could figure out how to cover with tests so that developers could have a directional indication of whether or not changes being introduced in code were breaking some sort of intended behavior of the system. The full live e2e test suits take well over an hour for both projects (the EKS project is over 2 hours while the ECS project is ~1.5 hours) and incur real AWS usage costs while the Floci tests run in minutes on any machine with a container runtime and have no costs (other than the electricity it takes to run your computer) associated with them.
The live e2e test suites are necessary because there’s certain things that can only be learned from live testing and it remains the only way to actually validate the deployed state of the systems. These tests were designed to give developers iterating on a feature immediate feedback on whether or not their changes had introduced anything breaking in advance of an e2e test. Hopefully this makes the process of developing a feature a lot more streamlined and less time consuming or effort intensive overall.