Well, I strongly believe in testing all the queries/transactions (for example the repository pattern is super helpful to separate concerns and allow you to test

Well, I strongly believe in testing all the queries/transactions (for example the repository pattern is super helpful to separate concerns and allow you to test only what concern your queries and the DB); but those are tested separately from the workflow of your service, if we are talking about unit tests. Why? Because otherwise either you write a gaziliion of tests, or they are unreliable. As an example, if you have in the service you wanna test various code paths, and your queries have paths of their own (what happens if you don't retrieve any object? if some property is null? and so on), I just think it gets messy quickly. My solution is to test things separately, at least in unit tests. Obviously, this has pitfalls (it's easy and fun to write green tests, so not always tests respect the interface of the components and they don't get red even if something is wrong); but that's where integration testing come into play. Have a few code paths where you touch multiple external services, and you want to test that everything actually works? Create integration tests that use either a fake or the actual service in a `staging` environment, take 10x time to run, but test the path that is most important for your logic. Obviously, if you many unit tests, you will have way less integration tests, but they serve different scopes, and one cannot substitute the other!