Service-Oriented Architectures Testing: A Survey

Abstract

Testing of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) plays a critical role in ensuring a successful deployment in any enterprise. SOA testing must span several levels, from individual services to inter-enterprise federations of systems, and must cover functional and non-functional aspects. SOA unique combination of features, such as run-time discovery of services, ultra-late binding, QoS aware composition, and SLA automated negotiation, challenge many existing testing techniques. As an example, run-time discovery and ultra-late binding entail that the actual configuration of a system is known only during the execution, and this makes many existing integration testing techniques inadequate. Similarly, QoS aware composition and SLA automated negotiation means that a service may deliver with different performances in different contexts, thus making most existing performance testing techniques to fail. Whilst SOA testing is a recent area of investigation, the literature presents a number of approaches and techniques that either extend traditional testing or develop novel ideas with the aim of addressing the specific problems of testing service-centric systems. This chapter reports a survey of recent research achievements related to SOA testing. Challenges are analyzed from the viewpoints of different stakeholders and solutions are presented for different levels of testing, including unit, integration, and regression testing. The chapter covers both functional and non-functional testing, and explores ways to improve the testability of SOA.