Browsing by Author "Lassila, Atte"

Modern software systems increasingly consist of independent services that communicate with each other through their public interfaces. Requirements for systems are thus implemented through communication and collaboration between different its services. This creates challenges in how each requirement is to be tested. One approach to testing the communication procedures between different services is end-to-end testing. With end-to-end testing, a system consisting of multiple services can be tested as a whole. However, end-to-end testing confers many disadvantages, in tests being difficult to write and maintain. When end-to-end testing should adopted is thus not clear. In this research, an artifact for continuous end-to-end testing was designed and evaluated it in use at a case company. Using the results gathered from building and maintaining the design, we evaluated what requirements, advantages and challenges are involved in adopting end-to-end testing. Based on the results, we conclude that end-to-end testing can confer significant improvements over manual testing processes. However, because of the equally significant disadvantages in end-to-end testing, their scope should be limited, and alternatives should be considered. To alleviate the challenges in end-to-end testing, investment in improving interfaces, as well as deployment tools is recommended.