NOTE: These patterns assume you have a working understanding of Akka's JavaTestKit
AKKA is all about building hierarchies of actors to represent a system. I've found this is a great way to decompose, design, and if needed distribute a system. This means your system becomes a hierarchy of actors, where parent actors create and manage their child actors, and child actors either carry out some unit of work, and/or themselves become parent actors.
But this can be a bit of a pain when it comes to writing tests for your actors. For example, say we have an actor, actorA, who in turn creates one or more child actors. I could have actorA create its child actor(s) as part of its instantiation. This is attractive especially if I know the exact child actors its going to create.
