Open Web Services Testing

Abstract

The advance in web services (WS) and service oriented architecture (SOA) applications has led to the development of new types of systems in which different heterogeneous components and platforms can connect and collaborate to solve a business problem. This advancement adds a new level of abstraction to the existing stack of technologies and development methodologies, but it adds also new challenges. One such a big challenge 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.