A simple, lightweight framework for testing RESTful services with TTCN-3

Micro-service architecture has become a standard software architecture style, with loosely coupled, specified, and implemented services, owned by small teams and independently deployable. TTCN-3, as test specification and implementation language, allows an easy and efficient description of complex distributed test behavior and seems to be a natural fit to test micro-services. TTCN-3 is independent of the underlying communication and data technology, which is strength and weakness at the same time. While tools and frameworks are supporting micro-service developers to abstract from the underlying data, implementation, and communication technology, this support has to be modeled in a TTCN-3 based test system, manually. This paper discusses the concepts of a TTCN-3 framework on the four different levels of the Richardson-Maturity Model, introducing support for testing hypermedia controls, HATEOAS, proposes a TTCN-3 framework and open-source implementation to realize them and demonstrates its application by a concrete example.