Ontology-based test case generation for testing web services

Web Services (WS) enables agile application development by orchestrating the existing service components. However, the dynamically constructed service-based system has to be tested dynamically and automatically at runtime without human intervention. To address the challenges of automatic WS test case generation, this paper proposes a model driven ontology-based approach with the purpose of improving test formalism and test intelligence. The semantic WS specification OWL-S is used to describe the application logic of composite service process. A Petri-Net model is created to provide a formal representation of the OWL-S (Web Ontology Language for Web Service) process model. The Petri-Net ontology is defined to incorporate the operation and IOPE (Inputs, Outputs, Preconditions, and Effects) semantics for test generation. Test cases are generated from two aspects. Test steps are generated by traversing various execution paths of the Petri-Net graph. Test data are generated by reasoning over the IOPE ontology. ©2007 IEEE.