DOMAIN-SPECIFIC LANGUAGE FOR INTELLIGENT TESTING OF MICROSERVICE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS BASED ON MOCK-OBJECT TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Testing service-oriented and microservice-based systems is challenging due to strong dependencies on external services and distributed environments. Mock-based testing is widely used to address this issue; however, existing solutions rely on low-level configuration mechanisms that increase complexity and reduce maintainability. This paper proposes a domain-specific language (DSL) for intelligent specification and generation of mock services. The approach enables high-level, domain-oriented description of mock behavior and supports transformation into executable configurations for existing mocking platforms. The proposed solution aims to improve readability, reduce configuration effort, and enhance testing efficiency in distributed software systems. The paper reviews existing tools for mock-based testing of service-oriented applications and provides a comparative analysis based on ease of use, configuration flexibility, and the complexity of supported test scenarios. The analysis shows that existing solutions consistently trade off between expressiveness and accessibility, a limitation that the proposed DSL aims to address. To evaluate the proposed approach, a comparative experiment was conducted across four test scenarios of varying complexity. DSL-based configurations were compared against equivalent configurations defined without the DSL, using three metrics: specification size (SLOC), maximum nested block depth, and maintainability index. The results show that the DSL reduces cyclomatic complexity. The composite quality score of DSL-based configurations exceeds the baseline by 38 % on average. These findings confirm that the proposed DSL simplifies the creation of mock services and makes distributed system testing more accessible to a wider range of project participants.