Dependency-based criteria for testing web services transactional workflows

Abstract

Transactions are a key issue to develop reliable web service based applications. The advanced models used to manage this kind of transactions rely on the dependencies between the involved activities (subtransactions). Dependencies are constraints on the processing produced by the concurrent execution of interdependent subtransactions. Existing works use formal approaches to verify the consistency and correctness of dependencies in web service transactions, but there are no works about testing their implementation. This paper identifies and defines a set of possible dependencies using logical expressions. These expressions define the preconditions to be fulfilled for executing the subtransactions primitive tasks (begin, commit and abort). By using those conditions, we propose a family of test criteria based on control-flow for checking the dependencies between subtransactions. The test criteria provide guidance for test case generation in order to specifically test the implementation of web service subtransactions dependencies.