Approaches to testing service-oriented software systems

Bertolino A.

Service-level agreement  Testing of QoS  Service-oriented architecture  SOA test governance  Back-box and white-box testing of web services 

The attractiveness and popularity of Service-Oriented Soft- ware Systems (SOSSs) stem from the growing availability of independent services that can be cost-eectively composed with other services to dynamically provide richer function- ality. Service-orientation however poses new and dicult challenges to testers, especially when it comes to testing the interactions between heterogeneous, loosely coupled and in- dependently developed services. Service integration testing requires discipline, standardized processes, and agreed poli- cies to be put in place, which we referred to as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Test Governance (STG). Discovered services usually provide just a syntactical interface, enabling some general black-box tests, but insucient to develop an adequate understanding of the integration quality between the interacting services. Besides, testing for the functional and extra-functional properties of a composite SOSS can- not generally rely on the ready or full availability, for test- ing purposes, of all invoked services (e.g., their usage might bring unwanted side eects). In this talk we will survey some of our recent results on SOSSs testing that span over the above needs. We will rst discuss how the STG concept is implicit behind any approach to testing composite SOSSs and then give an overview of three dierent, complemen- tary SOSS test approaches realizing dierent grades of STG, namely: the state-of-practice prototype tool WS-TAXI, for fully automatic generation of black-box test inputs; the novel SOCT approach allowing for test coverage measurement of independent services without loosing their implementation neutrality; the PUPPET tool for model-based generation of a testbed simulating the functional and extra-functional behavior of invoked external services.

Source: 1st International Workshop on Quality of Service-Oriented Software Systems, pp. 1–2, Amsterdam, 25 August 2009

Publisher: ACM Press, New York, USA

Metrics