Simplifying Software Testing in Microservice Architectures through Service Dependency Graphs

Abstract: A popular architecture for developing large-scale systems is the microservice architecture, which is currently in use by companies such as Amazon, LinkedIn, and Uber. The are many benefits of the microservice architecture with respect to maintainability, resilience, and scalability. However, despite these benefits, the microservice architecture presents its own unique set of challenges, particularly related to software testing. Software testing is exacerbated in the microservice architecture due to its complexity and distributed nature. To mitigate this problem, this project work investigated the use of a graph-based visualization system to simplify the software testing process of microservice systems. More specifically, the role of the visualization system was to provide an analysis platform for identifying the root cause of failing test cases. The developed visualization system was evaluated in a usability test with 22 participants. Each participant was asked to use the visualization system to solve five tasks. The average participant could on average solve 70.9% of the five tasks correctly with an average effort rating of 3.5, on a scale from one to ten. The perceived average satisfaction of the visualization system was 8.0, also on a scale from one to ten. The project work concludes that graph-based visualization systems can simplify the process of identifying the root cause of failing test cases for at least five different error types. The visualization system is an effective analysis tool that enables users to follow communication flows and pinpoint problematic areas. However, the results also show that the visualization system cannot automatically identify the root cause of failing test cases. Manual analysis and an adequate understanding of the microservice system are still necessary.