Service Oriented Testing for Web Services

Abstract

Web Services are an emerging facet of Service Oriented Architecture and have promised to address the challenging issue of application integration. Web Services, as a concept, have been developed in order to build and create distributed software applications. These services have many advantages such as, the interoperability between heterogeneous applications, and the ability to design and launch these services regardless of platform, programming language or operating system. For enterprises and academic establishments this is advantageous in a number of ways. It has become apparent however that Web Services face many diverse challenges which are preventing the technology from truly being adopted. Many industries such as defence and critical infrastructure have become increasingly interested in the use of Web Services but in order for them to play an integral part in today’s society, an array of issues must first be addressed. We believe that as an issue, trust can be considered as one of the main technological barriers currently facing Web Services, in particular, trust challenges such as reliability and security. By implementing Web Services into systems that rely on having high standards of reliability and security, trust needs to be guaranteed between the provider and the consumer. One way to help provide assurance for this is to provide adequate means of testing. At its core, testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors to ensure whether a system is functioning as intended. This can involve activities such as specifying test cases, generating test data, monitoring test execution, measuring test coverage, validating test results and tracking system errors. In recent years, research on testing Web Services and Web Service compositions has been gaining much attention and is growing at a rapid pace. Testing is vital in any environment to help ensure a degree of trust. While there are many issues facing Service Oriented Architecture and in particular, Web Service technology, the trust challenge is a particularly critical issue which needs to be addressed. This paper outlines current research for the effective means of testing Web Services, online and in the cloud computing environment. We aim to provide means for Web Services to be composed and tested in real time, over the cloud, utilising test case generation methods and Oracle decision making. By testing Web Services and ensuring their functionality, we can provide a degree of trust to the service consumer, that the Service they are requesting is available and will function as intended. We have detailed the importance of Service testing and the reason for why it should be considered as an immediate issue to address.