Invariant-Driven Automated Testing

TL;DR

This paper introduces APOSTL, a logic-based API annotation language, and PETIT, a tool that automates microservice testing using annotated OpenAPI specifications, addressing current testing gaps in microservice architectures.

Contribution

It extends API specifications with logic-based annotations for testing and develops an automated testing tool that works without source code access.

Findings

APOSTL effectively annotates APIs for testing purposes.

PETIT automates microservice testing using annotated specifications.

The approach improves testing automation in microservice architectures.

Abstract

Microservice architectures are an emergent technology that builds business logic into a suite of small services. Each microservice runs in its process and the communication is made through lightweight mechanisms, usually HTTP resource API. These architectures are built upon independently deployable and, supposedly, reliable pieces of software that may, or may not, have been developed by the team using it. Nowadays, industries are dangerously migrating into microservice architectures without an effective and automatic process for testing the software being used. Furthermore, current API specification languages are not expressive enough to be used for testing purposes. To solve this problem it is necessary to extend currently broadly used API specification languages. APOSTL is a specification language to annotate APIs specifications based on first-order logic, with some restrictions. It has the purpose of extending the currently used API description languages with properties that can be useful for testing purposes, transforming these description documents into useful testing artefacts. Besides providing information needed for testing an application, APOSTL also provides an API with semantic. This additional information is then leveraged to automate microservice testing. The work developed in this thesis aims to fully automate the microservice testing process. It is achieved by the implementation of PETIT a tool able to test microservices when provided with an OpenAPI Specification document, written in JSON and properly annotated with the previously proposed specification language, APOSTL. The tool is able to analyze microservices independently from the source code availability.