Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining momentum as an emerging distributed system architecture for business-to-business collaborations. This momentum can be observed in both industry and academic research. SOA presents new challenges and opportunities for testing and verification, leading to an upsurge in research. This paper surveys the previous work undertaken on testing and verification of service-centric systems, which in total are 177 papers, showing the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies and testing tools and identifying issues for future work. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Testing and verification in service-oriented architecture: a survey

: This report makes recommendations for testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations consisting of infrastructure, services, and end-to-end processes. Testing implementations of SOA infrastructure, services, and end-to-end processing in support of business processes is complex. SOA infrastructure is often composed of multiple, independently constructed commercial products-often from different vendors-that must be carefully configured to interact in an appropriate manner. Services are loosely coupled components which are intended to make minimal assumptions about where, why, and under what environmental conditions they are invoked. Business processes link together multiple services and other systems in support of specific tasks. These services and systems may operate on remote platforms controlled by different organizations and with different SOA infrastructures. Such complications make it difficult to establish appropriate environments for tests, to ensure specific qualities of service, and to keep testing up-to-date with changing configurations of platforms, infrastructure, services, and other components.

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Testing in Service-Oriented Environments

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving business agility and reuse. However, organizations implementing SOA-based solutions are facing new implementation challenges related to validation and verification activities in an SOA environment, especially of runtime system quality attributes such as interoperability, security, reliability, and performance. This position paper presents some of these challenges.

Challenges for assuring quality of service in a service-oriented environment

Developing robust web services is a difficult task. Field studies show that a large number of web services are deployed with robustness problems (i.e., presenting unexpected behaviors in the presence of invalid inputs). Although several techniques for the identification of robustness problems have been proposed in the past, there is no practical approach to automatically fix those problems. This paper proposes a mechanism that automatically fixes robustness problems in web services. The approach consists of using robustness testing to detect robustness issues and then mitigate those issues by applying inputs verification based on well-defined parameter domains, including domain dependencies between different parameters. This integrated and fully automated methodology has been used to improve three different implementations of the TPC-App web services and several services publicly available on the Internet. Results show that the proposed approach can be easily used to improve the robustness of web services code.

A Technique for Deploying Robust Web Services

Web Services are a set of technologies designed to support the invocation of remote services by client applications, with the key goal of providing interoperable application-to-application interaction while supporting vendor and platform independence. The goal of this work is to study the real level of interoperability provided by these technologies through a massive experimental campaign involving a wide set of very popular frameworks for web services, implemented using seven different programming languages. We have tested the inter-operation of eleven client-side framework subsystems with three of the most widely used server-side implementations, each one hosting thousands of different services. The results highlight numerous situations where the goal of interoperability between different frameworks is not met due to problems both on the client and the server side. Moreover, we have identified issues also affecting interactions between the client and server subsystems of the same framework.

Understanding Interoperability Issues of Web Service Frameworks

Interoperability refers to the ability of software and hardware on multiple machines from multiple vendors to communicate with each other without significant changes on either side. Web services streamline enterprise application integration by making it easier to tie applications running on heterogeneous platforms together helping them communicate correctly, effectively and at reduced cost. The difficulty of integration is a function of the level of interoperability between the applications being integrated. Even though there are established standards for Web services messaging (SOAP), description (WSDL) and discovery and registry (UDDI), custom implementations of these protocols by individual vendors has led to various interoperability issues. Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) recently released Basic Profile 1.0, addressing the interoperability issues with core Web services standards. In this paper, we look at some of the key Web services interoperability issues pointed out by practitioners and critically examine how Basic Profile 1.0 addresses them. Further we also examine some limitations of the profile. We conclude by evaluating a popular Web services implementation against the profile and present our observations.

Akash Saurav Das

Papers

WS-I Basic Profile: a practitioner's view