Microservices Testing – Best Strategies to Follow

The Microservice architectural approach is not recent in the software development world. Many companies and start-ups have switched to this architectural style and already reap its benefits. Automated Testing approaches and processes should adapt to the changes as well. In Testsigma we always keep up to date and we definitely can shed some light to the effective testing strategy for a microservices architecture. Want to make your  Automated Testing strategy an effective one? Let’s learn the ropes of the modern approaches in microservices testing!

What is Microservices Testing?

Microservices testing ensures that individual components of a microservices-based application perform correctly both in isolation and as part of a more extensive system. This entails individually testing each microservice using the unit, integration, and end-to-end testing methodologies to ensure its functionality, performance, and stability. The ultimate purpose of microservices testing is to ensure the whole system’s quality and to give end-users a seamless experience.

Microservices Testing Types

Microservices testing is an important part of microservices development since it encompasses numerous sorts of testing to assure the quality and dependability of microservices-based applications. The following are some examples of common microservices testing.

1. Unit testing

Unit testing is a sort of testing in which individual components or modules of a microservices-based application are tested in isolation. This testing ensures that each microservice works correctly and its code fulfills the necessary functionality and quality criteria.

2. Integration Testing

It is testing that examines several microservices’ interactions in a system. This testing seeks to uncover any difficulties that may develop due to the integration of various microservices, such as communication faults or data discrepancies.

Get to know here in a detailed comparison of Unit Testing VS Integration Testing

3. Contract Testing

Contract testing is a sort of testing in which the contracts or agreements between distinct microservices in a system are tested. The contracts describe each microservice’s expected inputs and outputs and the communication protocols used to interface with other microservices. Contract testing ensures that each microservice follows its contract and that any changes to the contract of a microservice do not impair the system’s overall operation.

Read about API Contract Testing.

4. End-to-End Testing

This testing comprises testing the entire microservices-based application, including all microservices and their interactions, from start to finish. Testing end-to-end is used to identify any problems that may arise due to the integration of several microservices, network delays, or other external factors that may impact the system’s overall performance and dependability.

5. Performance Testing

This testing method evaluates the performance and scalability of microservices-based applications under varying load situations. This testing aims to discover any bottlenecks or performance difficulties that may develop due to the system’s high traffic or load and to ensure the system can handle the predicted workload.

6. Security Testing

This method entails examining the security and privacy of microservices-based applications to ensure they are secure against threats such as unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security issues. Security testing aims to discover any security vulnerabilities and ensure the system is secure under applicable security standards and regulations.

How to Do Microservices Testing?

Step 1 – Identify Testable Microservices

Identify microservices to test by considering their features and interactions, ensuring focus on key system components. This stage ensures testing efforts are focused on the system’s key components.

Step 2 – Define Test Scenarios

Define test cases for microservices by describing their actions, inputs, and expected outputs. Cover a wide range of scenarios to ensure proper performance in various conditions, ensuring robust and dependable functioning.

Step 3 – Set Up Test Data

To conduct thorough testing, set up test data for each microservice, covering real-world scenarios and edge cases. Ensure the data accurately represents inputs and situations experienced in real-world operations.

Step 4 – Establish Test Environment

Establish a separate test environment for efficient isolation and testing of microservices, resembling production but allowing varied control. This separate environment prevents interference with live systems and ensures correct duplicate circumstances.

Step 5 – Implement Test Automation

To streamline the testing process and improve efficiency, leverage test automation. Develop automated tests for your microservices to execute the defined test scenarios repeatedly and reliably. Test automation reduces human error, accelerates testing cycles, and allows for frequent regression testing as your microservices evolve.

Step 6 – Execute Tests

Keep a close eye on test cases and automated tests to identify irregularities and failures. Properly document outcomes, including failures, problems, and unusual behavior, to ensure accuracy and efficiency.

Step 7 – Analyze Test Results

Analyze test findings to identify patterns, trends, and improvement opportunities. Examine problems, identify underlying reasons, and address them. Analyze test results to understand microservices’ quality and performance, enabling iteration and functionality enhancement.

Step 8 – Perform Integration Testing

Microservices often interact with one another, making integration testing crucial. Conduct integration tests to verify the seamless communication and compatibility between different microservices. By testing their interactions, you can ensure the smooth functioning of the entire system and catch any potential issues arising from service integration.

Step 9 – Conduct Performance and Load Testing

To evaluate the scalability and performance of your microservices, perform performance and load testing. Simulate high loads and measure how the microservices handle increased traffic and user activity. This step helps you identify potential bottlenecks, optimize performance, and ensure your microservices can handle the expected workload.

Step 10 – Monitor and Maintain

Testing microservices is a continuous activity, even after initial development and deployment phases. Regularly monitor their performance in the production environment and use efficient monitoring techniques to identify and fix issues, ensuring long-term stability and dependability.

Remember, microservices testing is a comprehensive and iterative process. Following these steps will guide you through a systematic approach to testing, enabling you to deliver high-quality microservices that meet the desired functionality, performance, and reliability standards.

Is Microservices Testing Complex?

Because of the dispersed nature of microservices-based applications and the requirement to test each microservice individually and as part of the more extensive system, microservices testing can be complicated. This might lead to many tests that are difficult to manage and maintain using typical testing methods.

Testsigma is an AI-driven unified platform that provides a complete end to end testing solution to simplify and streamline microservices testing. Testers can create, automate, and execute tests for each microservice and the whole system using Testsigma, ensuring quality and reliability at every level of the development cycle. The platform supports the testing needs of all ends that can assist teams in enhancing their testing efficiency and effectiveness, such as test data management, communication, and reporting. Overall, Testsigma can assist teams in overcoming the complexity of microservices testing and efficiently achieving their testing objectives.

What is a Microservices Testing Strategy?

Microservice test strategies represent a plan or method of providing full coverage testing within a microservice architecture. Having a microservice testing strategy is part of an overall microservices plan for software development. In a microservice software development approach the application is created by developing individual modules capable of running independently. Modules are then connected through APIs or other connectivity points to run as a full application. 

Why do You Need a Microservices Testing Strategy?

Microservices testing strategy breaks an application into smaller, independent services and then tests each separately. It tests the APIs and communication between these services to ensure seamless integration. 

This strategy ensures the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of applications built on microservices architecture by using techniques like stubbing, mocking, and specialized tools.

Microservices Testing Strategies

Developing a microservice testing strategy is essential for testing a microservice application suite. Creating a test strategy helps a QA testing and development team tackle the full scope of testing microservice-based applications. 

Common microservice testing types include:

• Shift left testing
• Service virtualization
• Canary testing
• Chaos engineering
• Load testing
• Continuous testing 
• Failover or resiliency testing

Shift-left testing means testing early and during the entire development cycle starting with prototypes. Testing early combined with testing small coding increments helps find and address issues quickly and simply. It’s more efficient and productive for developers to fix as they code rather than returning later and trying to debug or troubleshoot an issue. 

Service virtualization is used to model or simulate the behavior of dependencies that are not yet in the code. For example, third-party services or applications, APIs, or messaging systems a microservice module interacts with. Service virtualization enables testing to continue during the entire development cycle. 

Canary testing means taking a group of users and having them acceptance test functionality iteratively to ensure the application is ready for production. Consider doing a canary test run for each microserve module to help flush out defects before the full application is released to production. 

Chaos engineering is a microservice testing strategy for identifying issues with resiliency and failover. In other words, what happens when dependencies fail or there is an error in an application functionality? Does it stall completely, crash, or fail gracefully? 

Continuous testing means exactly what it says. Testing continues from day one to the production release. Instead of scheduling test execution after development is complete, testing simply continues day in and day out until the production-ready application is complete. 

Load testing is a microservice test strategy that is handy for ensuring each microservice module handles a designated load. It’s related to performance testing. Load testing ensures the application handles variances in network, connectivity, and system speeds under different usage levels. 

Resiliency or Failover testing ensures microservice modules manage errors and failures adequately. It usually involves reviewing logs and generating failure scenarios to ensure the microservice responds appropriately. 

How to Build a Testing Strategy for Microservices?

You can build a microservices test strategy for microservices as follows,

Clearly understand microservices architecture:

Get a clear understanding of your microservices architecture, including how it communicates, the dependencies, and individual functionalities.

Identify testing scope:

Define the scope of testing, including which components require testing and how they interact with other services. Include unit testing, integration testing, component testing, contract testing, performance testing, and end-to-end testing as part of microservices testing strategies.

Automating testing:

Use automation testing tools to automate testing wherever possible to increase efficiency and reliability. 

Implementing continuous testing:

Integrate testing into the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to ensure that every code change is thoroughly tested before deployment. 

Test in isolation:

Test each microservice separately to ensure independence and avoid failures. 

Monitor and analyze test results:

Monitor test execution and analyze test results to identify bugs, if any, and work on fixing them.

How to Build an Automated Testing Process for a Microservice Architecture?

Test automation, as well as manual testing, has to be properly planned at the very beginning as the incorrect approach can lead to non-beneficial processes and huge expenses. To avoid that we should, first of all, define our goals and to create a test strategy.

So, the steps to build a successful test automation process is the following:

1. Ask your customer as much as possible regarding his expectations from test automation.
2. Set quality goals and follow them when creating a test strategy and implementing tests themselves.
3. Analyze which testing types will help you to achieve your quality goals.
4. Stick to shift-left approach and adapt the whole development and testing process to it.
5. Write tests taking into account the fact that according to the testing pyramid the cost of test increases starting from Unit tests. The amount of tests increases starting from the end-to-end tests. So, it is a bad approach to having a few unit tests and implement a bunch of UI tests. That contradicts the shift-left approach helps to identify the issues as earlier as possible.

Testing Pyramid for Microservices:

For the effective test approach creation of a non-monolith architecture, we should bear in mind that the overall system and isolated web services function as expected. If we talk about testing strategy, the adjusted to the new architecture test pyramid can depict the balanced approach taking into account the following different testing types:

The test pyramid has a Unit test as a primary layer. Developers implement them. At this level, we verify that core functions work correctly without external references. The more unit test we have, the more we can identify issues in the codebase at the earlier stages of the development process and avoid many other impacts on the whole system. This approach is called shift-left: when the Automated Testing is shifted at the earlier stages in the timeline, the recovery is less expensive.

The classical pyramid consists of component tests, integration tests, Contract tests, and Automated Testing. Component tests check service autonomy; integration tests verify external resources, and Contract tests verify service interaction. Spring Cloud Contract and Pact are the most reliable and effective tools for contract testing. It is essential to develop end-to-end tests only when all other tests are implemented. Before writing the test strategy, asking the customer about their expectations from test automation is essential.

Testsigma is built to assist to start your test automation smoothly. Now you can impress your customers with a cutting-edge automated testing approach!

How do you Automate Microservices Testing?

All testing needs planning to improve both effectiveness and efficiency. Save yourself time, energy, and increase productivity with solid test strategy planning. Test automation is an excellent example of how a good project can go wrong without planning. 

Build successful test automation by:

• Setting realistic goals that result in creating valid test automation. 
• Select which testing types to test with automation. 
• Prioritize what you automate for the greatest effectiveness. 
• Use a modular automated test design to make test automation more maintainable.

Challenges of Testing Microservices

When it comes to testing methodologies, the peculiarities of microservices architecture present additional problems and concerns. Let’s talk about these traits and their challenges for testing:

1. Distributed Nature:

Microservices distributed across multiple servers and locations can cause delays and network traffic disruptions. To ensure system resilience, it’s crucial to build tests that manage network variability and mimic diverse situations, ensuring CI/CD pipelines are not disrupted.

2. Autonomous Deployment:

Microservices can be deployed independently with API compatibility, enabling flexibility but increasing testing complexity. Testing methodologies should cater to frequent deployments, with effective integration testing and versioning practices detecting compatibility and integration issues early.

3. Increased Test Area:

Microservices can be deployed independently with API compatibility, enabling flexibility but increasing testing complexity. Testing methodologies should cater to frequent deployments, with effective integration testing and versioning practices detecting compatibility and integration issues early.

4. Polyglot Nature:

Microservices require multiple programming languages and frameworks for each service, making a single test framework insufficient for all components. It’s crucial to include a variety of testing frameworks and tools to adapt to each microservice’s unique demands, ensuring proper testing throughout the system.

5. Dynamic Production Environment:

Microservices can be deployed independently and developed by autonomous teams, making production a constantly evolving goal. API contracts, contract testing, and monitoring methods are crucial for setting explicit boundaries and enforcing contracts between services. Continuous monitoring helps identify compatibility issues and maintain system integrity.

New testing methodologies are needed for microservice stability in distributed, dynamic contexts. Implementing unit, integration, end-to-end tests, test automation, contract testing, and extensive monitoring is crucial for efficient tackling these challenges.

Tips to Ensure the Success of Your Microservices Testing Strategy

Successful microservices testing strategies start with reviewing the microservice development plan and architecture. It’s important to understand how the system is designed to function and the role of each microservice. 

Successful microservice testing strategies include:

• Verifying the microservice architecture and design.
  • Understand how it works to identify defects better and create valid tests. 
• Implement automated testing that’s intuitive to edit repeatedly.
  • Automating tests from the start helps save time and increase test consistency and repeatability.
  • Automated testing is useful but not required for continuous testing.
  • Consider using a modular test design pattern that mirrors each microservice.
• Test each microservice individually and again as a fully connected application.
  • Testing each component helps identify errors within components. 
  • Testing the fully integrated applications ensures all the connectivity functions as expected. 
• Use diverse types of testing techniques for more thorough test coverage.
  • The greater the diversity, the more defects are found in different areas. 

Benefits of Microservices Testing Strategy

Benefits of a microservice test strategy include:

• Each module can be deployed as a single independent unit. 
  • Easier to test, debug, and troubleshoot issues within a single functional unit.
• Helps to parallelize development.
  • Developers can work on each module in parallel to help with coding quality.
  • Enables more focused integrated unit test development. 
• Directs the design of test automation for cohesiveness and validity. 
  • Helps to organize test automation for a single module. 
  • Assists in creating end-to-end test automation using a modular test design. 
• Improved time to market
  • Get your high-quality application into the hands of customers sooner. 

Challenges in Implementing Microservices Testing Strategy

Implementing microservices testing strategies comes with a few challenges. The first is risk. Using a microservices architecture inherently introduces a high level of risk as a distributed model. In other words, there are more possible points of failure especially with integrated connections. 

Another challenge is an increase in the complexity of testing. Testing microservices involves being able to test not only each component but also all connectivity points. The breadth of testing increases when having to test application components, APIs, database connections, and messaging systems. Add to that all embedded third-party applications and you see there’s a great deal of testing to cover. 

Include time for development to create mocks of dependencies so testing is continuous throughout development. Mocks or similar constructs allow testing to continue when the final dependency code is under development. It takes additional time for developers to create working fakes to ensure testing can continue. 

Be sure to include service variability in your microservice test strategy. Service variability refers to the possible variances in service behavior and configuration between environments. Services may not behave the same way in production as they do in a development or staging system. 

Conclusion

Developing a comprehensive and detailed microservices testing strategy helps uncover risks and ensure effective test coverage. Take the time to understand the microservice architecture and design to ensure valid test development. 

Microservice application development provides multiple benefits including improved productivity and time to market. Microservices provide a component-based system that is simpler to develop, debug, and identify defects during development. Production releases can be better controlled to prevent customer issues resulting in a higher-quality application. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Can we reuse our existing regression tests for microservice testing?

Possibly. If your team has developed modular functional tests it may be possible to reuse them. 

Who does the testing for microservices? Is it a QA task?

Either or both. Some tests may be implemented within the code base by developers. Others may be created and executed by QA testers. 

Is microservice integration testing necessary?

Yes. Testing only each component leaves integration to chance. Integration testing finds issues with connected systems. 

Can you add microservices to a non-microservice architecture?

Yes. Some applications use microservices to perform only specific functions.

Microservice Testing

Testing Microservices | What it is, Types and Top Challenges

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