A Framework for Testing RESTful Web Services

Abstract

While web services greatly reduce the cost and complexity of integrating systems; they also introduce a number of additional challenges for testing because web services require standards, API, communication protocols and architecture that are not fully supported by traditional software testing methods and tools. In this paper, we discuss a software framework for providing a variety of test inputs for web service depended software, including predetermined test cases, replay of previous data, and generation of random test cases through data perturbation from a provided template.

Testing and verification in service‐oriented architecture: a survey

“…At the composition level, increased cost of testing due to invoked services can be reduced by introducing service stubs. Approaches such as those of Mayer and Lübke , Mani et al , Van Gilst , Ilieva et al and Li et al address this issue by providing functionality for generating and using stubs. Using stubs also help in reducing the cost of invoking services that perform business transactions.…”

“…The tool provides simulated testing and offers an injection tool, a data dependency analysis tool, a test case generation tool and a value generation tool. Reza and Van Gilst introduced a framework that is aimed at simulating RESTful Web services. Li et al introduced a toolkit called SOArMetrics for evaluating SOA middleware performance and application testing.…”

REST service testing based on inferred XML schemas

“…Reza [6] presents a software environment for the simulation of REST services in testing scenarios. For each simulated service, it allows the specification of interfaces and input parameters as XML documents.…”

Cost-aware pareto optimal test suite minimisation for service-centric systems

“…The approaches using simulated testing [11,12,14,15] has the potential benefit of reducing testing cost by testing the correctness of a service composition offline. The approaches aimed at generating replacement services [12,13,16,24] can directly reduce the testing by avoiding calls to the actual services during testing. Even though these approaches can potentially reduce testing cost they do not eliminate the need for runtime testing.…”

“…Effects of testing in some systems, such as stock-exchange systems, where each usage of the service requires a business transaction, that carries with it a monetary cost. Solutions aimed at reducing the cost of testing in ScST, such as simulated testing and stub/mock services have previously been proposed [11,12,13,14,15,16]. However, these approaches do not eliminate the need for runtime testing (testing with real services).…”