Model-Based Testing in Cloud Brokerage Scenarios

Abstract

Abstract. In future Cloud ecosystems, brokers will mediate between service providers and consumers, playing an increased role in quality assurance, checking services for functional compliance to agreed standards, among other aspects. To date, most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) testing has been performed manually, requiring duplicated effort at the development, certification and deployment stages of the service lifecycle. This paper presents a strategy for achieving automated testing for certification and re-certification of SaaS applications, based on the adoption of simple state-based and functional specifications. High-level test suites are generated from specifications, by algorithms that provide the necessary and sufficient coverage. The high-level tests must be grounded for each implementation technology, whether SOAP, REST or richclient. Two examples of grounding are presented, one into SOAP for a traditional web service and the other into Selenium for a SAP HANA rich-client application. The results demonstrate good test coverage. Further work is required to fully automate the grounding.

X-Machine Based Testing for Cloud Services

“…Among these, only a few only a few approaches have used the state-based nature of services for testing purposes; and this research has not led to a mature testing tool. The current paper is extending the work from [14] in the following aspects. It introduces the theoretical X-machine background, needed to understand the test suite generation mechanism and the properties (or design for test conditions) the specifications should satisfy.…”

“…The XML specification of a service consists firstly of a functional part, which defines the constants and variables used in the service model, the signatures of the service's operations and their inputs, outputs, branching conditions and state update effects on the memory variables [14]. For a complete description of the service specification language, the BNF of the language may be consulted [14].…”

“…For a complete description of the service specification language, the BNF of the language may be consulted [14]. The second part of the XML specification is represented by a state machine, which captures the high-level control states of the service and shows its allowed transitions, labelled with the names of distinct request/response (event/action) pairs taken from the operations [14], which correspond to the processing functions of the SXM.…”

“…It is fairly simple to build a grounding and the process is described in [14]. Each TestSequence starts with a freshly-created (or reset) instance of the service.…”

“…The web standard for specifying the functional behaviour of the system under test is also provided and it has been presented in [14]. To assist users understanding how a valid service specification may be defined according to this schema, several XML service specifications are also given as examples, as valid implementations of the schema and provided on the tool web page 4 .…”