Formal Methods for the Specification and Testing of Data‐centric Web Services: A Case Study

Abstract

Web services allow organizations to capture their human and software-based capabilities as modular software components that are called remotely over a network. In such service-oriented settings, it is important to establish an agreement that sets the obligations of the service provider and the expectations of the service consumer. Since traditional approaches such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are loosely defined with respect to data integrity aspects, in previous work, we proposed a formal model for specifying data-centric Web services. The goal is to formally and unambiguously specify the service behavior in terms of its underlying data model and data interactions. In this paper, we present a case study where we use our model to specify and verify data-centric Web services. We demonstrate our proposed methodology using three state-of-the-art specification languages: JML, Dafny and RESOLVE. We also explore the use of our specification to automatically generate test cases for data-centric services. Our goal is to study the feasibility of our proposed model and also to pinpoint the challenges and limitations of current specification and verification tools.