A tool supported approach to perform efficient regression testing of web services

Abstract

In this paper, we present a tool supported approach to perform efficient regression testing of web services. Functional and non-functional web service testing is done with the help of WSDL parsing and regression testing is performed by identifying the changes made thereafter. We identify, categorize, and capture the web service regression testing needs into three different categories, namely, changes in WSDL, changes in code, and selective re-testing of web service operations. To capture above three changes we proposed three intermediate forms of WSDL, namely, Difference WSDL (DWSDL), Unit WSDL (UWSDL), and Reduced WSDL (RWSDL), respectively. These intermediate forms of WSDLs are then combined to form Combined WSDL (CWSDL) which is further used for regression testing of the web service. This approach is prototyped as a tool, named as Automatic Web Service Change Management (AWSCM), which helps in performing the efficient regression testing of web services by selecting the relevant test cases to constructing reduced test suite from the old test suite file of SoapUI. The reduction in the effort for regression testing of web service is estimated by two proposed cost metrics. We present three case studies demonstrating the applicability of the proposed tool for the real world projects.