[twic]

This is absolutely a fallacy. If you're testing a microservice and stubbing the other microservices, you aren't doing the equivalent of the high-level test on the monolith. You're doing something like a macro-unit test of the monolith with internal services stubbed.

[mac-chaffee]

I think there's a tendency to believe that a microservice written by someone else can be replaced with a stub that just validates JSON or something.

But in my experience, that thinking leads to bugs where the JSON was correct, but it still triggers an error when you run real business logic on it.

It's an easy trap to fall into because that microservice exists to abstract away that business logic, but you can't just pretend it doesn't exist when it comes to testing.

So stubs may be good for unit tests, but only if there are integration tests to match.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

It's also useful if the team providing the service can provide a fake or a stub with interesting pre-programmed scenarios, this reduces the number of false assumptions someone can make, is sort of a living documentation (assuming people update their fakes). Something like contract testing (Pact etc) can also be useful, although I haven't seen it being used in practice yet.