testing

Testing

Does my skill work?

You can test your skill in a number of ways. You do NOT need to publish your skill before you can begin testing and using it on any of your devices.

• Type in your utterance to the Service Simulator, within the Test page of your skill on the Developer Portal.
• Launch EchoSim.IO, the browser based testing tool. Toggle your Language setting via a link near the top right, such as EN-US, EN-GB, DE-DE.
• Your skill can be launched on any Alexa device you own or have registered, such as Echo, Tap, or Dot.
• You can test your Lambda code from the Lambda Console. Click Actions, Configure Test Event, and select or paste in some test request json.
• You can review the Cloudwatch Logs to see standard output from your Lambda function executions. Just click on Logs and then click on the log group with the same name as your function.

Local Testing

If you manage your Lambda code in a local folder on your laptop, you can test your code with a unit test command. Choose any one of the testing options here:

• You can write another javascript script that calls your skill code directly. Navigate to the tests folder, such as Cookbook/ExternalCalls/httpsGet/tests and type node test.js
• You can define and run a local test in your src/package.json configuration file, under the scripts section. Verify the test command and then type in the command: npm test to a terminal prompt.
• You can define and use a remote test in your src/package.json configuration file, under the scripts section. Verify the invoke command and then type in the command: npm invoke to a terminal prompt. This will test the function that exists within AWS Lambda. You will need to have previously installed and configured the AWS CLI for this to work.

If the test works, you should see a formatted JSON response similar to this:

{
	"version": "1.0",
	"response": {
		"outputSpeech": {
			"type": "SSML",
			"ssml": "<speak> The population of New Jersey is 9000000 </speak>"
		},
		"shouldEndSession": true
	},
	"sessionAttributes": {}
}

TestFlow

You can run a sequence of conversation events as a local test and view formatted results in your console window.

Go to TestFlow

See also

Read about Node.JS and other tools in the folder: tools

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