Building Microservices Architecture (MSA)-based applications is immensely supported by using software testing fundamentals. With the increasing interest in the development of MSA-based applications, it is important to systematically identify, analyze, and classify the publication trends, research themes, approaches, tools, and challenges in the context of testing MSA-based applications. In order to know state of the art regarding testing and MSAs, we conducted a systematic mapping study.

The search yielded 2,481 articles, and 33 articles were finally selected as the primary studies with snowballing. The key findings are that (i) 5 research themes characterize testing approaches in MSA-based applications; (ii) integration and unit testing are the most popular testing approaches; and (iii) addressing the challenges in automated and inter-communication testing is gaining the interest of the community. Additionally, it emerges that there is a lack of dedicated tools to support testing for MSA-based applications, and the reasons and solutions behind the challenges in testing MSA-based applications need to be further explored.

This study will be presented at the Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)