Automatic Conformance Testing of Web Services

Abstract

Abstract. Web Services are the basic building blocks of next generation Internet applications, based on dynamic service discovery and composition. Dedicated discovery services will store both syntactic and behavioral descriptions of available services and guarantee their compatibility with the requirements expressed by clients. In practice, however, interactions may still fail because the Web Service's implementation may be faulty. In fact, the client has no guarantee on the quality of the implementation associated to any service description.In this paper, we propose the idea of high-quality service discovery incorporating automatic testing for validating Web Services before allowing their registration. First, the discovery service automatically generates conformance test cases from the provided service description, then runs the test cases on the target Web Service, and only if the test is successfully passed, the service is registered.In this way, clients bind with Web Services providing a compatible signature, a suitable behavior, and a high-quality implementation.

Model-Based Testing in Cloud Brokerage Scenarios

“…Previous research on service testing has come out of strategies for testing ServiceOriented Architectures (SOA) [5,6,7,8]. The emphasis is on provider-based testing of services, using translations into agreed web standards [5].…”

“…The emphasis is on provider-based testing of services, using translations into agreed web standards [5]. For example, Bertolino et al [6] translate category-partition testing to XML [6], Heckel et al devise a graphbased approach [7] and a contract-based approach [8] to exercise service functional protocols in a black-box way. A few approaches [9,10,11] have developed finite state-based testing methods, recognizing the state-based nature of services, but find it necessary to augment web standards, which only describe service interfaces (WSDL 1 ) and message formats (SOAP 2 ), with additional semantic information, in order to capture how the services should behave.…”

“…Furthermore, there is no unified testing approach adopted by providers and brokers, since there is no shared formal specification of the service, so it is unclear whether the same QA has been applied across different service implementations, or across different host platforms. The need for commonality in service description and repeatable quality assurance after testing on multiple platforms is what distinguishes the current research from other work on service testing [5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

Audition of Web Services for Testing Conformance to Open Specified Protocols

“…The possibility of enhancing the functionality of a UDDI service broker with logic that permits to perform a testing step before registering a service has been firstly proposed in [28] and [27], and subsequently in [20]. This idea is also the basis for the framework introduced in this paper.…”

“…In [20] instead the authors propose to include Graph Transformation Rules that will enable the automatic derivation of meaningful test cases that can be used to assess the behavior of the WS when running in the "real world". To apply the approach they require that a WS specifically implements interfaces that increase the testability of the WS and that permit to bring the WS in a specific state from which it is possible to apply a specified sequence of tests.…”