Automatic generation of smoke test suites for kubernetes

Abstract

Setting up a reliable and automated testing process can be challenging in a cloud environment, due to the many ways automatic and repeated system deployment may unexpectedly fail. Imperfect deployments may cause spurious test failures, resulting in a waste of test resources and effort. To address this issue, developers can implement smoke test suites, which are shallow test suites that are executed before any other test suite to verify that the system under test is fully operational, and can be thus reliably tested. This paper presents KubeSmokeTester, a tool that alleviates the effort necessary to implement smoke test suites by providing automated generation capabilities for Kubernetes applications. The tool has been experienced with 60 versions of two industrial systems demonstrating its suitability in anticipating spurious test failures.