Business-process-driven gray-box SOA testing

Abstract

Challenges are emerging in testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. Current testing is not sufficient to deal with the new requirements arising from several SOA features such as composition, loose coupling, and code without a graphical user interface. The most critical architecture information of an SOA solution is actually how services are composed and interact with each other. This paper proposes a gray-box testing approach, that is, an approach that involves having access to internal workings, data structures, and algorithms when designing the test cases but tests at the user level as a black box, that is, by applying inputs and observing outputs. This approach leverages business processes and the underlying SOA layered architecture to better test SOA solutions. A commonly used language to model business processes is BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), which is the focus of the approach described in this paper. Among the layered artifacts, the business proces view represents the global behavior of the SOA system and thus is a good candidate as supplemental architectural information to the functional requirement or specification in test-case design and generation. This approach has three key enablers: test-path exploration, trace analysis, and regression test selection. BPEL Tester is an innovative tool that implements this method. It has been piloted in several projects and the initial pilot results are presented in this paper. © Copyright 2008 by International Business Machines Corporation.