If you are responsible for delivering software that was assembled from several different components, you should want to make sure that every one of these parts functions as it should when a user uses it in the real world. The complexity and difficulty of testing your stack in any distributed systems setting increases exponentially with the amount of components that make up your overall stack.
Multiple databases, interconnected services, third-party APIs that your apps integrate with, and more are all possible. These might not apply to you if you are developing a monolith, if there is only one component in your software stack, or if your startup is still in its very early stages.
The testing pyramid’s age-old wisdom might be applied to test a single server that connects to a single database and possibly has a single front-end. However, things change, procedures alter, client requirements get more complex, and users demand more sophisticated experiences. Major developments in the field of software development are currently dominated by services and apps engaging in complex discussions.
The new world order, as a service
In this post, you’ll learn how to design APIs and create modular interfaces for building software that you can expand upon later. Should you, like myself, have been striving for a more lucid perspective, that piece will cast a bright light over this entire terrain.
How can you set up procedures for testing your software suites after creating APIs in a sustainable manner, especially when it comes to integration testing and distributed systems?
You may be employing a hybrid of these several approaches, or any of the popular design patterns, such as serverless or microservices, to develop your product. Ensuring that every component works together as intended during production is your ultimate objective. Integration testing can help with this.
Prior to going into production, it is crucial to ensure that all of the component parts of the product work effectively together. It involves teamwork. Make sure each person in the stack is both a fantastic performer and a cooperative team member.
A reference guide for creating best practices
Software testing specialists have talked extensively about a number of well-known methods for service integration testing. A team of two will deal with problems significantly differently than a team of twenty working on a product feature. However, there are certain universal characteristics to difficulties’ general nature.
Here is a checklist that you may use to get typical mistakes when selecting the integration testing approach:
- For developers, avoid duplicating the entire services stack on local computers. When feasible, use functional tests and mocks. If your team is tiny or you are new to microservices, you might constantly want to test everything at once. For example, you might create a Vagrant image that combines all of your services and runs them on a development machine. Scaling this with your stack’s increasing complexity is not doable. As Cindy Sridharan stated in their post “Testing Microservices, the sane way,” you’ll ultimately have a “full stack in a box.”
- Establish a single procedure that each team uses to publish API documentation for the API’s users, or a single source of truth for all of your documentation. Developers outside of your organisation or other teams working on frontend development or microservices writing could be your customers. In any event, when there is a discrepancy between behaviour and documentation, you and the users of your APIs shouldn’t argue over who was correct.
- Remember that different systems have different I/O rates. When testing in production, you could encounter unexpected failures and race conditions if your testing setup does not account for this. Since disc and network I/O are closer to production, you should include them in the calculation; however, keep in mind that you are still only making assumptions based on simulations of your actual infrastructure.
- Make sure no unmanaged errors occur in your services. Take care of every error and accurately log it. In your test environment and in production, ensure that unhandled errors do not reveal details that could be exploited as attack vectors. For further insights, refer to Amber Race’s talk from the latest POST/CON on API testing.
- List the dependencies between services. We need to organize the interactions between the systems being tested. We can create a dependency chain to determine which services communicate with each other. Any service that returns data should be able to offer an API so services can establish a connection with it. You would then be able to replicate each service with a dependency chain diagram and clearly defined API surface areas. In this instance, we upgrade unit tests to include mocks for the dependent services in addition to testing every function.
- 6.Verify the terms of your service agreements. Contract testing ought to be a component of your microservices’ integration tests. Service mocks ought to be created from the contracts and updated as needed. Therefore, you ought to have the authority to mandate that all services give their clients access to an updated contract.
- Don’t take too long to put out a complex setup that would be difficult to duplicate. Make the onboarding process for new members unpleasant. Make sure your development resources aren’t being overspread if your business is small.
You’ll adopt a more compassionate perspective on API development after using this checklist. It involves people creating those services as well as services communicating with one another. You and your team ultimately select workflows and toolchains based on requirements and preferences when considering people.After combining it with other tactics, you should have a staging area before moving forward with production, or develop a strong plan for production testing. Ultimately, not only do your software components integrate more effectively, but your teams also work together in a more defined and transparent manner.
Micro services integration testing can be easier.
In less than a month, I became a Developer Advocate at Postman, and I’ve discovered that the company’s basic tenet of simplifying things aligns well with my own objective of making complicated concepts easier to comprehend and implement.
It doesn’t have to be hard, even if I recognise that distributed systems are chaotic by nature and that traditional methods of integration testing don’t work on them. Using the right tools and workflow, you can divide any challenging issue into manageable jobs.
In accordance with this, the Postman Developer Relations team is creating several recipes that illustrate how to simplify these operations while still interacting with your current stack. Depending on whether you work as a manager overseeing teams of developers, designers, testers, test automation engineers, quality assurance personnel, or manual testers, we will have different recipes for you. We want to continue dispensing those recipes under this publication, so stay tuned for more shortly!
