Web Services Open Test Suites

Abstract

In modern software solutions vendors are racing to keep pace with their customers' needs for more and more distributed systems enable to enhance collaboration and reduce their time to market. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising software methodology that addresses this problem. SOA advocates the integration of loosely coupled systems across platforms. SOA adds a new level of abstraction to the existing stack of technologies and development methodologies, however, it adds also new challenges. The most popular way to implement SOA is using Web Services (WS). WS is an XML technology to integrate loosely coupled systems. The challenge facing WS is testing. From the client prospective, a Web Service is a black box that needs to be tested before being used, mainly to confirm the claims of services' providers about the quality of their services. By calling a WS, we delegate part of our business logic to an external provider to do it for us. Thus, we have no control of what could happen during the execution of that part of the business logic. To this end, many testing approaches and techniques have been proposed in the literature to address various aspects related to WS testing. In our effort to improve WS testing infrastructures, we propose a framework for service integrators to collaborate during Web Services testing by making test suites open to the public and share testing results.