Microservices Testing, Automation & Its Challenges

Today, most applications, be it on the web or mobile, use microservices under the hood, which gives an exceptionally smooth user experience even if the traffic or load is extremely high and has remarkably high availability even though some of the features are having issues or not working entirely.

Thanks to microservices architecture, applications can be made flexible and scalable. But before we discuss the benefits of microservices and various approaches to automating them, let’s first understand what a microservice is.

What is a Microservice?

Microservice architecture came into existence because of the everlasting issues IT engineers faced with a monolithic architecture, where the entire application was being deployed as a single program. It led to several problems related to frequent code changes and increased operation costs because of the need for very high resource provisioning to meet the peak loads, which keeps changing from time to time and bringing down the entire application if there is an issue in a module or feature.

To address the issues mentioned above, IT engineers developed microservices. Microservices are a programming architecture that allows developers to design flexible, highly scalable applications. In contrast to monolithic architecture, this architecture decomposes an application, breaking it down into separate services (microservices) that execute specific functions. Each microservice performs, connects, and communicates with others using standard APIs (application programming interfaces).

Also, each microservice has its environment where it might store data by connecting with different databases or third-party APIs and have its processing power. This environment is managed inside the containers, which provide the required abstraction and security. This allows developers to write services on various technologies using different languages. Thus, microservices are flexible and scalable. Furthermore, each microservice has a specific job, which is small and relatively simple.

Developers like to use microservices architecture because of its modular characteristics, which makes it easier than monolithic architecture to develop and test. While it solves some of the critical issues related to development, it introduces more challenges related to code maintenance and collaboration between the microservices teams, testing teams & OPS or infra teams. It also makes it difficult for the testing team to carry out effective & consistent testing of microservices and to provide quality deliverables throughout the cycle.

How to Test Microservices?

So, what is the best way to test microservices? The answer is simple yet complex: Let’s automate microservices testing. Let’s understand the approaches to testing microservices effectively and the challenges they pose for testing teams.

The automated testing process often includes unit tests, which focus on small, isolated parts of the service, and component tests, which examine the service, including its interactions with databases and other services. This comprehensive testing approach is crucial in maintaining the robustness and reliability of applications built using a microservices architecture.

This approach tests the APIs and communication between these microservices to ensure they integrate correctly. It also emphasizes unit testing, contract testing, and end-to-end testing.

This strategy helps ensure microservices-based applications’ reliability, scalability, and maintainability by using techniques like mocking, stubbing, and specialized tools. It allows for thoroughly testing each microservice individually without relying on other services, speeding up the testing process and making identifying and fixing bugs easier.

Additionally, this strategy helps detect data inconsistency, communication failures, and integration problems that may arise from the complex interactions between microservices over networks. It also supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices by enabling structured and automated testing, which allows for confident deployment of application changes.

Five Microservice Testing Layers

Testing microservices involves several layers since it must be done to ensure that the system runs as planned.

In unit testing, everything is isolated to achieve the best results for each microservice tested independently. Integration testing confirms how the independent units of microservices communicate with each other and exchange data.

Apart from this, Contract testing ensures that the APIs between services fulfill specific signed agreed-on contracts, eliminating incompatibilities in sharing data. Then comes the system testing, which verifies that all the microservices function as a single entity in a live usage environment to pick any deficiencies.

Finally, the performance testing shows how the microservices respond to different loads and where congestion could occur. All these layers provide the necessary armor around a microservices architecture to make such a setup highly reliable.

Challenges in Implementing Automated Testing of Web Services

While implementing automated web service testing has apparent benefits, it creates issues for the testing & development teams. Here are the details:

• Communication across different microservice & testing teams:
  Inter-communication between multiple agile microservices dev and test teams is time-consuming and difficult. Sometimes, teams work in silos, not sharing enough technical/non-technical details, which causes communication gaps.
• Data Setup & Integration Testing of Microservices
  Testing of all microservices does not happen in parallel. End-to-end integration testing of inter-dependent microservices is a nightmare; these microservices might not be ready for testing in a test environment. Every microservice will have its security mechanism and test data. It’s a daunting task to find failover of other microservices when they are dependent on each other.
• Frequent Changes in Business Logic & Design
  Frequent changes in business and technical requirements in the agile software development methodology lead to increased complexity and testing effort, which in turn increases development and testing costs.
• Lack of Documentation for Microservices and their Dependencies
  Due to business logic and design changes, it is difficult to document all the changes happening in the microservices and their dependencies. This creates a gap in understanding across the development and testing teams for the changes in microservices, increasing the efforts required to test them.
• Different Technologies & Different Databases
  While this gives developers the flexibility to write code in the technology and language they prefer for each microservice and allows them to use SQL or no SQL databases depending on the requirements, it also creates problems when conducting integration or end-to-end microservices testing.

How to Overcome These Challenges

Here are some of the suggestions that can help teams to overcome above mentioned challenges:

• Synchronized or Asynchronized Communication across Teams
  It is of utmost importance for the teams to communicate across the team about the changes being made in microservices and have formal approvals in place from the interdependent service team to avoid future conflicts about the shift, ensure all remain in sync, and save effort from rework. Teams can use chat platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, etc., to set up synchronized communication across the teams; it is also possible to set up a formal approval process from stakeholders before making any changes to any microservices.
• Create a Local Test Environment
  It is possible to replicate the cloud environment locally by deploying all services into a single vagrant instance. This way, it is possible to test all microservices independently, which will help in early detection of issues. It is also possible to unit test the microservices and related functions.
• Mocking & Stubbing
  To carry out integration testing on the services, it is necessary to mock the interdependent services and create stubs that will act as honest services with the required data. This allows users to run tests without worrying about the actual service being implemented or deployed, making setting up the test data needed for testing purposes easy.
• Integrate Automated Test with CI/CD
  If the automated tests are reviewed and practical, integrating these tests with CI/CD and setting up quality gates can help the team identify issues whenever any change is introduced in any of the services.
• Updated Documentation
  When making changes to the microservices, it is essential to document or update the existing documentation so that any team member can refer to it. If the documentation is updated occasionally, bringing new team members up to speed is possible. Teams use Wiki Pages, Confluence Pages, Jira Tickets, etc., to document all the service changes or features.
• The Testing Team should be well-versed with the latest Tools & Technologies
  The testing team should know different microservice protocols, tools, and technologies to create fast, practical testing and robust automation scripts. This can be a bit of a challenge, and the learning curve is very steep for the testing team, as different microservices teams might use other languages, technologies, and protocols to create the microservices. The testing team must leverage the ability to make a common framework that allows testers to create scripts so that anyone in the team, including the development team, can extend the script and framework to run unit, integration, or end-to-end tests. It is also possible to impart training to the testing team before the start of the project or to have at least a few experienced testers in the team who can handle such challenges and can guide other team members as well.

Wrapping Up: Summary

Microservices architecture is amongst the most scalable and flexible yet could be complex. The tricky thing is that they occur between a plethora of independent services. Hence, as the application evolves towards being more specific in its discrete components, it becomes hard to enforce a way for the microservices to have well-coordinated communication and manage the resources.

To counteract such obstacles, the efficiency & effectiveness of testing methodologies should be set and implemented, and the critical aspects of testing methodologies should be devoted to integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end testing to check the interactions between services and the application base’s organizational command. It is also essential that testing teams retain themselves up-to-date with the fresh tools & technologies in testing and know more practically how different frameworks are used while practicing implementing automated tests.

Moreover, because of the nature of microservices, it is not easy to identify and debug problems during runtime, hence the need for solid testing paradigms that ensure the survival and stability of the application in ever-changing production settings. It is imperative. Moreover, because of the nature of microservices, it is not easy to identify and debug problems during runtime, hence the need for solid testing paradigms that ensure the survival and stability of the application in ever-changing production settings. These challenges must be handled optimally to ensure organizations harness all the benefits associated with microservices architecture while avoiding or minimizing the risks related to the application development style.