Pattern: Service Component Test
patternContext
You have applied the Microservice architecture pattern. The application consists of numerous services. Services often invoke other services. You must write automated tests that verify that a service behaves correctly.
Problem
How do you easily test a service?
Forces
- End to end testing (i.e. tests that launch multiple services) is difficult, slow, brittle, and expensive.
Solution
A test suite that tests a service in isolation using test doubles for any services that it invokes.
Examples
Spring Cloud Contract is an open source project that supports this style of testing.
Resulting context
This pattern has the following benefits:
- Testing a service in isolation is easier, faster, more reliable and cheap
This pattern has the following drawbacks:
- Tests might pass but the application will fail in production
This pattern has the following issues:
- How to ensure that the test doubles always correctly emulate the behavior of the invoked services?
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