Control Flow Analysis and Coverage Driven Testing for Web Services

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an approach to discover the control flow graph of Web services for Web services analysis, verification, and testing. For this purpose, three novel methods are proposed. First, we introduce a domain independent RDF Schemas for concise resource oriented functional specification of Web services operations. Secondly, we describe the use of RDF entailment to accurately derive the control flow from the functional specifications. We developed a transformation from RDF graph to SPARQL query to facilitate the RDF entailment which offers flexibility and extensibility over the direct graph matching approach. The third is a linkage based Web services modeling and analysis framework, within which we apply an improved Google PageRank algorithm to efficiently calculate test coverage potential using the derived control flow. We justify that the proposed linkage based Web services modeling and analysis framework is particularly suitable for testing Web services. A prototype of the proposed methods has been implemented and tested on some standard based Web services. Experimental results show that the control flow analysis is quite efficient and accurate, and the coverage based test results of the proposed approach are very promising.