The rise of microservices architecture for building large-scale, loosely coupled systems has underscored the need for tools that can test microservices at runtime in production environments. While various tools exist for testing microservice-based applications (MSBAs) in development settings, few are used in production runtime environments. We propose a self-testing approach to validate microservices at runtime with minimal disruption to MSBAs. Our research has three main objectives: (1) assessing existing MSBA testing tools, (2) developing design requirements and models for self-testing microservices at runtime, and (3) evaluating our self-testing design for runtime validation of MSBAs. A key aspect of runtime testing for MSBAs is enabling microservices to conduct self-tests. Previous work on self-testing has mainly focused on monolithic systems, which differ significantly from MSBAs. Given that microservices are self-contained, our approach builds on prior self-testing research to address the unique challenges of MSBAs. We identify runtime design requirements and necessary models for implementing self-testing. These models include a UML profile guiding the design and implementation of runtime validation for MSBAs and a UML component diagram applied to an MSBA testbed. Our design requirements support two strategies: (1) replication with validation and (2) safe adaptation with validation. We validate our approach by applying our design requirements and models to an MSBA testbed called Rideshare, using the replication with validation strategy. A study evaluates the feasibility of our approach. It measures the overhead using static and dynamic metrics for two versions of the Rideshare MSBA: the original version and a re-engineered version implementing our self-testing design.

Juan P. Sotomayor is a Ph.D. candidate at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University, specializing in software testing for microservices. His research areas of interest include software engineering, software testing, and microservices architectures. Juan is the first author of several peer-reviewed publications presented at prestigious venues such as the IEEE International Conference on Computers, Software, and Applications (COMPSAC) and Software Quality Journal (SQJ), and has co-authored papers in the IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (QRS).