Protocol compatibility notations for service integration testing

Abstract

This paper provides a notation of protocol compatibility among services and describe how this can be useful to test interoperability in Service-Based Applications (SBA). Indeed, the features of a SBA, like distribution and loosely-coupling make usual testing techniques inefficient, especially when the choreography model is adopted. We argue that only the service interface description is not enough to prove and test compatibility among services. Services behavior should also be described. In this paper we introduce a formal model based on message-exchange that should fit for it, considering a service as a non-deterministic finite state automaton. According to this model, we can finally discuss a definition of protocol compatibility and its role for test generation.