A DESIGN SCIENCE APPROACH TO MITIGATING INTER-SERVICE INTEGRATION FAILURES IN MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURES: THE CONSUMER-DRIVEN CONTRACT TESTING FRAMEWORK AND PILOT IMPLEMENTATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55640/Keywords:
Consumer-Driven Contract Testing, Microservice Architecture, Distributed Systems, Quality AssuranceAbstract
Purpose: Microservice Architectures (MSA) enhance agility but introduce significant complexity in managing inter-service communication and mitigating integration failures, often rendering traditional End-to-End (E2E) testing impractical. This study aims to propose, implement, and evaluate a formal Consumer-Driven Contract Testing (CDCT) framework as a superior quality assurance strategy for distributed systems.
Design/Methodology/Approach: A Design Science Research (DSR) approach was employed to develop the CDCT framework artifact, which supports both REST and gRPC protocols. A pilot implementation was deployed within a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline on a representative microservice topology. The framework’s efficacy was quantitatively evaluated by measuring key quality assurance metrics: Time to Feedback (TTF) on induced breaking changes, Integration Fault Isolation (IFI), and the impact on a Deployment Confidence Index (DCI), comparing results against an E2E testing baseline.
Findings: The CDCT framework demonstrated a substantial reduction in TTF, allowing developers to detect integration faults orders of magnitude faster and at an earlier stage in the development lifecycle. The IFI metric confirmed that CDCT precisely isolates breaking changes to the consumer-provider contract, significantly reducing debugging effort. The unified approach to REST and gRPC validation confirmed the framework’s technological versatility. The framework effectively facilitates independent deployment, a core tenet of MSA, by providing a high DCI.
Originality/Value: This research delivers a validated, formal CDCT framework that extends coverage to heterogeneous communication protocols (REST/gRPC) and provides quantitative empirical evidence for its superiority over conventional integration testing in an MSA context.
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