Functional SOA testing based on constraints

Abstract

In the fierce competition on today's software market, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are an established design paradigm. Essential concepts like modularization, reuse, and the corresponding IP core business are inherently supported in the development and operation of SOAs that offer flexibility in many aspects and thus optimal conditions also for heterogeneous system developments. The intrinsics of large and complex SOA enterprises, however, require us to adopt and evolve our verification technology, in order to achieve expected software quality levels. In this paper, we contribute to this challenge by proposing a constraint based testing approach for SOAs. In our work, we augment a SOA's BPEL business model with pre- and postcondition contracts defining essential component traits, and derive a suite of feasible test cases to be executed after assessing its quality via corresponding coverage criteria. We illustrate our approach's viability via a running example as well as experimental results, and discuss current and envisioned automation levels in the context of a test and diagnosis workflow.