When you want to test successful architectures like microservices, test automation plays a predominant role. Especially when you have apps that require high scalability, you can not opt for manual testing. Test automation makes it easy for developers to rectify the changes, bug vulnerabilities and get them to a quick fix and hence it is preferred solutions.
Microservices has mainly three types of tests to undergo with test automation. Let us understand and analyze how we can implement test automation in microservices.
Unit testing
Unit testing considers the application as the group of several parts/components to conduct the right level of testing. Since each element of an application is made of multiple programming business logic, it is essential to test microservices individually and with more accuracy.
Unit testing in test automation involves writing a test case for a specific unit of code. It is better if you can keep unit tests independent of each other as much as possible. Since microservices and test automation are known for their autonomous bounded contexts, following this pattern will give more enhanced results.
You can also mock the external dependencies as required by the test cases under testing for more effective testing of the business logic.
Layer Integration Test
Layer integration tests are best suitable for enterprise applications. Since the enterprise applications are complex and their functionalities, it is better to structure them into layers. It is required to write the integration test layer for running the proper integration between the layers, for example, to establish synchronization between data, business, and web.
Layer integration test works to keep all the layers in synchronization. For example, making a call to the web layer and queries being properly performed from the data layers are the things that need to be double-checked.
System & API Tests
System testing is performed for all the external resources employed in the application under test. For taking external resources into account, there have to be automated tests explicitly written for external interfaces, databases, and required dependencies by the application. System tests undertake functions that are directly in influence to the end-users of the application.
API tests are the most integral part of any microservices testing. Testing APIs by writing an automated test is not difficult but you can find more accessible ways to test the data accessibility. You can test the API with automated tests written without having any dependencies on external resources.
User Acceptance Tests
As the name suggests, user acceptance tests gauge the percentage of app usability for end-users. User acceptance test hints developers to reflect those changes in the application which are not favorable by the end-users.
Your automated tests should be focused on creating real-time usage scenarios. For example, writing test cases that require fetching the data from the database in real-time application. Because it is one of the critical aspects of the software/web application where users might get bad user experience by not being able to meet with the expectations.
Approval testing
Approval testing refers to the approval of test results. It is sort of an acknowledgment for the testing being performed in which you have to compare the results of previous tests results to the current state of the test result. The expected output once approves the previous test results. Especially when you have to perform data-driven testing, this testing approach helps a lot by optimizing the lines of code written for testing of different layers.
The automated software stores the approved version of testing and with fewer efforts, testers can perform the testing and mark them as approved or test failure. There has to be zero difference between the accepted version and the current version of the test case.
How Should you Conduct Test Automation in Microservices?
Microservices are independent services and testing in microservices should be performed independently. To reduce the overall efforts and time of the testing team, you can always separate the microservices and test them individually. Generating test scripts for microservices architecture is not time taking so it is easy to test the different functionalities of your microservices-based application.
Adopt a practice that inculcates cloud-based testing. In order to allocate resources dynamically, cloud-based testing is much required. You should go serverless or cloud-based to perform the testing in a dynamic and diverse setup like testing in microservices, parallel testing in multiple environments, and coordination with multiple hardware systems.
Conclusion
Choosing test automation for testing microservices-based application is itself a great transformation to your software development environment. You should not see automation testing practices as a tough deal to close but rather start exploring and learn. Test automation in microservices has changed a lot of perspectives of testers and eased the developers’ task in delivering bug-free software.
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