A microservice regression testing selection approach based on belief propagation

Abstract

Regression testing is required to assure the quality of each iteration of microservice systems. Test case selection is one of main techniques to optimize regression testing. Existing techniques mainly involve artifacts acquisition, processing and maintenance, thus hard to apply in microservice regression testing since it is difficult to obtain and process required artifacts from multiple development teams, which is normal in cases of microservice systems. This paper proposes a novel approach, namely MRTS-BP, which takes API gateway logs instead of artifacts as inputs. By mining service dependencies from API gateway logs, MRTS-BP analyzes service change impacts based on a propagation calculation, and selects test cases affected by changes based on impact degree values. To evaluate the effectiveness of MRTS-BP, empirical studies based on four real deployed systems are presented. Retest-all strategy and a regression testing selection approach based on control flow graphs called RTS-CFG are compared with MRTS-BP. The results show that, MRTS-BP can significantly reduce both the number of test cases and overall time cost while maintaining the fault detection capability of selected test suite, and that MRTS-BP can save more time cost than RTS-CFG with the similar safety and precision.