Self contained jar to help with black box testing

Self contained jar to help with black box testing

After reading this presentation on microservice testing from Tobias Clemson I got thinking about a problem recently I encountered working on a project which has a microservice’ish architechture. The problem is how to isolate a service which has a REST api and black box test it from end to end.

So I spent a few hours looking around at existing solutions and surprisingly enough most I found lacking or abandoned or needlessly complicated or forcing you to edit the black box you want to test (crazy right?!).

To illustrate I want to black box test the inputs/outputs at both ends for the pink middleware service in this diagram below

There are several levels of testing:

• unit and integration testing can help you be confident that a service (at a class/component level) does what it say would do (they would occur within the pink box above for example)

• system and acceptance testing are higher up from these and in context of microservices are usefull to check if a specification/contract is met.

At the backend side of the service I want to test I have found stubby4j to be the perfect tool for the job.

However due to specific environment settings, 3rd party dependancies, and no gradle install available on server where the middleware service i want to blackbox test runs. I realized that I would need a selfcontained jar file which would contain all my black box acceptance tests. I looked around and tespackage seems to do the job but on closer examination I found this maven project to be needlessly complicated and not maintained.

So having to scratch an itch I fired up my IDE and threw together the beginnings of a springboot project which can generate a self contained jar that would run junit tests annotated with my custom @BBTest annotation

This project is called groovy-springboot-bbtester