Natural language requirement specification for web service testing

Abstract

The following paper proposes a structured, natural language specification of web service behavior based on keywords in context. The advantage of this type of document is that it can be automatically analyzed in order to extract test cases for testing the web service. The test cases define not only what to test, i.e. what operations to invoke in what order, but also how to test, i.e. with what test data values. Our goal is to join requirement specification with test specification in one document which is used to both specify what the user requires from a service and to test if a particular service is providing it. On the one hand, a requirement table is generated from the text to compare with the functions offered. On the other hand a test case table is generated for executing those functions. From the test case table a test script is generated and from that test requests are produced. The test script is also used to validate the responses. All of the information required for both request generation and response validation is taken from the original service requirement specification. A case study depicts how the requirement document is processed.