Well there is obviously a point at which it will no longer work (way before Google scale). But the point is to stop testing services in a coupled way, the whole point of microservices is to make decoupling real, not to build a distributed monolith. Testing in a decoupled way helps this enormously.
Yeah, excepts it doesn't.
In those microservices setup more than not the change in the data to accomplish a client request is 3 or more services of "distance". Still, it needs to be accomplished.
If you don't coordinate all the services involved (all with different developers team, maybe from different contractors) AND if you don't do an end-to-end test, how can you be sure to do the requested change?
> In those microservices setup more than not the change in the data to accomplish a client request is 3 or more services of "distance". Still, it needs to be accomplished. If you don't coordinate all the services involved (all with different developers team, maybe from different contractors) AND if you don't do an end-to-end test, how can you be sure to do the requested change?
You're doing it wrong. If these services are really so deeply entangled that you can't change and test them one at a time, they shouldn't be independent services. Merge them, or otherwise rethink your service boundaries.
You can do these tests against a UAT environment. It doesn't have to run on your own box.
In my apps I use fakes in dev and test mode, which makes development very fast and easy. A few tests run against the actual UAT environment, but these are skipped unless a command line flag is passed.
