A study of testing a microservice system based on code coverage

The microservice architecture is a service-oriented architecture that supports the development of small loosely-coupled software services. In contrast to the monolithic architecture, the microservice architecture is increasingly popular among developers since it allows for an easier development process, reduces the barrier to adding new technologies to a system, and increases the efficiency of a system's scalability. Testing a microservice system with a test suite (i.e., a collection of test cases) is an important means for improving the quality of the microservice system. To guide the assessment and improvement of the test suite, code-coverage information is commonly used. However, there exists no research on investigating how code-coverage information can be used to measure and improve a test suite for a microservice system. To fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study on testing a benchmark microservice system by measuring code-coverage achieved by its test suite based on a coverage-measurement infrastructure that we build. The line-coverage results show that covering a major portion of the lines not being covered is blocked by error-handling branches (i.e., branches related to error handling). Based on the code-coverage information, we explore ways of augmenting the existing test suite to achieve higher code-coverage. In particular, guided by the code-coverage information, we augment the existing test suite by adding new test cases to aim for covering those functionalities whose related code portions are not covered by the existing test suite. In addition, to covering those error-handling branches, we augment the test suite by manipulating its execution environment, i.e., mutating the messages sent by a microservice to another microservice in order to aim for covering not-covered error-handling branches. Such coverage-guided test-suite augmentation helps achieve higher code-coverage of the microservice system.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Gorse, Shirdon Ismial

Contributors dc:contributor

• Xie, Tao

• Microservices
• Coverage

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Shirdon Gorse

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105244

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/105244