Testing Microservices With Parasoft SOAtest

Users can create automated tests for a variety of common microservices protocols (HTTP(S), REST, RabbitMQ, gRPC, GraphQL, Kafka, WebSocket) and message formats (JSON, XML, protocol buffers) using standard tooling in Parasoft SOAtest. SOAtest automatically understands which services to execute because it can consume the service contract and understand the endpoints and various payload structures. These test scenarios can then be efficiently leveraged within SOAtest’s load testing module, for load and performance testing.

To data-drive requests, SOAtest creates your test case and can leverage a wide variety of data sources (internal or external) to drive the data and validate the responses, simplifying the process of testing a wide variety of data inputs into your microservices.

In a reactive microservices architecture, it’s important to be able to push events to specific queues and validate that the microservices pick it up, operate on it appropriately, and push it to the correct queue or topic. Using Parasoft SOAtest, you can push specific messages onto the queues, using microservice-specific protocols and message formats.

SOAtest can also act as a consumer, waiting and listening to specific event streams, pulling off the messages, and validating their contents. Responses from a reactive microservice can be listened for and validated within the same test scenario. By doing so, SOAtest provides the critical isolation that’s required for microservice testing.

To solve the challenge of isolating individual components within an orchestrated microservices architecture, given the tightly-coupled nature of the services, to achieve a stable test environment, you can leverage service virtualization through SOAtest’s tight integration with Parasoft Virtualize. Use Virtualize in both orchestrated and reactive microservices to provide a mock service that can be used in place of the real service on-demand when your test scenario needs it, so you can focus on specific components and validate that their behavior is expected and predictable.

When a service is updated, a key component of testing is understanding the impact of change and reliably remediating affected services, both at a service level and environment level, where there’s a significant amount of disruption for both choreographed and orchestrated microservice architectures. Parasoft SOAtest’s Change Advisor helps users manage this disruption, enabling users to:

• Efficiently identify and assess the impact of change to a microservices request or response structure.
• Map the differences between two versions of a service.
• Migrate and update test cases and virtual services to the new version.

These capabilities help users significantly reduce the amount of time spent maintaining test artifacts. Additionally, Parasoft’s thin client interface for test orchestration provides unique visibility into the impact of changes, by providing visual representations of the environment, along with associated test cases that can predict and identify environmental change. With this insight, users can easily understand the relationship between different microservices, and how different services are impacted if an individual service goes away or fluctuates.

Mitigate the risks of untested microservices code by identifying coverage gaps. Parasoft SOAtest’s integration with Parasoft CTP enables you to collect and measure code coverage in end-to-end and integration testing scenarios for applications that involve multiple distributed microservices. Development and QA teams gain insights into code issues by reviewing interactive dashboards in Parasoft CTP and DTP and drilling down into reports.

• Identify previously unknown gaps in testing coverage.
• Optimize integration testing by using test impact analysis to identify specific test scenarios to run to validate changes in individual and downstream microservices.
• Collect code coverage from parallel, concurrent test executions in the same environment.
• Easily correlate individual test cases to the specific lines of code they cover.
• Publish coverage results to Parasoft DTP for a granular view of coverage for each microservice or an aggregated view of coverage for all microservices combined.

In end-to-end testing of distributed microservices, one of the biggest challenges is identifying the specific test cases needed to validate changes in downstream services. SOAtest’s test impact analysis (TIA) addresses this challenge by providing visibility into the intricate web of interconnected microservices.

Pinpointing the test cases affected by recent changes in microservices enables teams to focus testing efforts. This accelerates CI/CD workflows. Teams can easily execute the focused subset of their test suite needed to validate recent changes. This targeted approach ensures the reliability of APIs in microservice architectures while enabling greater agility and faster testing cycles—essential for environments with multiple daily releases.