Testing of Service-Oriented Architectures – A Practical Approach

Abstract

Abstract. Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have recently emerged as a new promising paradigm for supporting distributed computing. Web services, as well as integration-packages relying on message oriented middleware are special substitutes for this kind of architecture. However, even if a lot of work has been focused on how to build such systems less work has been invested in how testing and monitoring such systems could be done. It is obvious that cyclic testing in the development phase of such architecture can help to identify vulnerabilities early in the design phase which leads to a stable deployment of the system. Testing in distributed systems is very challenging and automated test tools can help to reduce the development costs enormously. In the next years vast investment will be made in integrating systems, as a lot of companies have the need to integrate their systems to establish more flexible workflows. In this paper we will propose an approach as to how automatic testing for SOAs can be done. We will introduce a Meta language in XML, which allows defining test cases for services. A service can be a Web service, as well as an adaptor for a messaging-system, such as Tibco. We define a generic Meta language, but predict that maybe some cases are not covered, as our research for automatic testing of SOAs is still in progress. This paper focuses on a real life prototype implementation called SITT (Service Integration Test Tool). SITT is designed in a way that it can also be used as a monitoring system for SOAs. It has the possibility to test and monitor if certain workflows between multiple service endpoints really behave as described with the XML Meta language. We will also explain a feature called online and batch testing. Online testing means that tests are going on in real time; in contrast batch testing has the possibility to test service endpoints not connected to SITT, which will be often the case when integrating systems with external departments or companies. This paper shows how SITT is designed and we will present its features by introducing a real-world application scenario from the domain of Telecommunications providers, namely "Mobile Number Portability". This paper focuses on SITT as a test tool, how SITT can be used as a monitoring system is not part of this paper.

Web services choreography validation

“…The WS-CDL documents used in our experiments can be found in tool website. 2 The properties to be checked are extracted from WS-CDL specification, and the corresponding formulas can also be found there. Tables 2 and 3 illustrate information about documents, properties and the time costs of building tuple lists, while Fig.…”

“…Web services compositions such as WS-CDL differ from traditional stand-alone software systems. Thus, new methodologies are needed to test Web services compositions [2]. And our works focus on testing the functionalities of a WS-CDL document.…”

Runtime Integration and Testing for Highly Dynamic Service Oriented ICT Solutions -- An Industry Challenges Report

“…Integration testing is addressed by Tsai et al [20], presenting Coyote, an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based integration testing framework; by Bartolini et al [3], discussing testing of data-flows in web service compositions; and Bertolino et al [5]. Testing of SOA, in general, is discussed in [8,9,10,22]. Many used concepts are borrowed from the distributed domain [17].…”

A Survey of Regression Testing in SOA

“… SITT: Service Integration Testing Tool (SITT) is used for automatic testing of SOA and used for monitoring purpose also [6].…”