Quick Tips for Testing Microservices Architecture

Microservices provide unprecedented benefits within a software development environment. It primarily aids in breaking major monolithic applications into tiny codes & functionality blocks. Further, collectively the several microservices construct a business application, where every single microservice communicates with another one via APIs.

A report by The Insight Partners states that, “Microservices architecture (MSA) is a procedure of developing software systems in which large monolithic applications are broken down into minor, manageable independent services. These services mainly focus on performing the tasks efficiently and communicate via language-agnostic protocols. By utilizing microservice architecture, organizations can concentrate on smaller independent services achieved by different smaller teams instead of focusing all teams on one large application.”

Furthermore, some of the major factors driving the growth of the microservice architecture include improvement in business time, transparency as well as enablement. Also, augmenting cloud adoption is another prime factor that is anticipated to boost the growth of the micro services architecture market.

On the other hand, this method has got its own challenges. The reality that there are multiple microservices creating an application means, followed by testing every single microservice individually, the entire application should also be approved to make certain that it is performing as required.  This makes the entire process of testing very complex. 

Moreover, along with every microservices, there is a need for getting APIs also tested, to ensure the seamless communicate amongst them.

Thus, the process of testing requires comparatively more testing engineers with detailed planning. However, nowadays, there are a few solutions evolving to make the task smoother, including:

Service Virtualization Products

The traditional method for testing cannot perform the detailed testing of every single inputs and output. At most, it can simulate definite end-points utilizing data. This merely offers fundamental verification of code & functionality. Also, isn’t reliable for simulating the real-world atmosphere where the application will actually be used.

This challenge can be beaten utilizing products of third party service virtualization that have become popular with time. These can simulate the end-point of an API in a manner that the overall call tree will get utilized, similar to that of the business environment. 

Unit & Integration Tests

CUnit Tests, as well as Integration Tests, make certain that each and every piece of the code even at the lowest levels is tested. Also, it ensures that every single microservice has been tested.

Likewise, other hacks that make the jobs of the QA engineers easier include System & User Acceptance Tests as well as Validating and Monitoring API Runtimes.