What is the best branching and test environment strategy to test early and often for a project with a backend microservice architecture and a front-end monolith?
A bit of context; our feature teams develop user stories on feature branches but do not have their one QA environment to test their user stories before delivery to the master (develop) branch, so they deliver their codes directly to the develop branch and deploy to one environment where they all test. We all know this is not the best strategy as it is prone to quality risks. I am tasked with improvising on improvement proposal to evolve the current situation. My idea is for the teams to be able to test each user story in an environment they can manage and maintain (deploy on demand) before they deliver to the develop branch, however, management thinks its a more costly approach and would like to be cost-effective solution. I am interested to hear your opinion.
When we were discussing a solution for a similar problem the idea was to create a docker instance for a particular frontend project combination of branches(we had 5-20 projects as dependencies for each frontend of each app).
The backend branch would have been deployed via the corresponding pipeline on demand.
We didn’t have a good solution for frontend and backend connection, as they needed separate servers. Additionally, our backend had several layers (internal middleware, internal backend, external backend).
The thing which would have taken coordination of several teams and a bit of budget had died due to politics and turnover.
I wonder if the team or you who are sort of in charge of finding a solution are already aware of the entire infrastructure: servers, connections, firewall, security, server resources, pipelines, software config(puppet, ansible), git jobs, deployment, packaging, compilation jobs.
We didn’t have a person that understood all of them, but made assumptions or guesses on a few.
I wrote a chapter about “How can I test a web application that has a micro services architecture?” for this eBook https://leanpub.com/howcanitestthis/ . Maybe it will help you? (please forgive the plug for the book)
Thanks guys for the valuable inputs!