Testing microservice applications

Abstract

Software maintenance costs are growing from year to year because of the growing software complexity. Currently, maintenance may take up to 92 percent of the whole project budget. To reduce the complexity of the developed software, engineers use different approaches. Microservice architecture offers a novel solution to the problem of distributed applications’ complexity. The microservice architecture relies on the comprehensive infrastructure, which reduces the complexity of the application.

Several large companies have successfully adopted the microservice architecture, but not many studies have examined microservice applications testing and quality assurance. In addition, smaller companies are showing interest in the microservice architecture and trying to adopt it using different infrastructure solutions to reduce software development and maintenance costs or to integrate legacy software into newly developed software. Therefore, we explore the possible approaches to microservice testing, describe the microservice testing methodology, and use design science to implement the microservice testing service that adopts the described methodology.

This study provides an analysis of different software testing techniques and offers a methodology for microservice testing. In addition, an example implementation illustrates the described methodology.