Quality Assurance of Micro-Services - When to trust your micro-service test results?

Micro-service architecture has become a standard software architecture style, with loosely coupled, specified, and implemented services owned by small teams and independently deployable. In particular, with the emergence of managed services, deployment aspects have to be addressed explicitly. While tools and frameworks support micro-service developers in developing and unit-testing their services, less attention has been given to higher testing levels, particularly to the integration testing phase. This paper identifies aspects that limit the expressiveness and therefore the trust of integration testing and test results in the context of managed micros-services and function as a service. We propose the introduction of instance identification to overcome these limitations and illustrate how instance identification can be used to enhance integration testing's expressiveness and trust into integration test results.