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Sharif-TaaWS: a tool to automate unit testing of web services

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Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture is a technology for designing software systems. Upon using this architecture, new challenges appeared for software testing in which unit testing can be viewed as the most essential and basic testing procedure. Many industrial tools and academic studies have presented a level of automation for unit testing of web services. Herein, we introduce a new tool called Sharif-TaaWS to automate the unit testing of web services through a method-based attribute grammar (MBAG) of the source code. This tool generates a test web service named TaaWS (Test as a web service), a combination of both online testing and testing as a service. Sharif-TaaWS has three modules including Initializer, MBAG generator, and TaaWS creator. These modules scan and parse the web service source code through the scan-grammar, generate MBAG, and create test cases in TaaWS. In this paper, we evaluate our proposed tool using different types of web services. Sharif-TaaWS is compared with other unit testing tools through the response time, test case generation, and report preparation time using different environments. The results show that Sharif-TaaWS has more ability to find web service faults and can reduce the testing process time through the attribute grammar and the test web service.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by a Grant from the Sharif University of Technology – Iran.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Elahe Habibi

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Room: 807, CE New Building, Azadi Ave., Tehran, Iran

    Seyed-Hassan Mirian-Hosseinabadi

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  1. Elahe Habibi
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Correspondence to Elahe Habibi or Seyed-Hassan Mirian-Hosseinabadi.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Rules and notations of MBAG

For each of the I, O, and C sections, the rules for generating MBAG are formalized as bellows:

  • Each variable has two main attributes, namely, type and value.

  • If a variable, such as a string, can be divided into smaller components, two new attributes, namely length and position are also considered for each component of the variable.

  • A condition can be defined for the attributes of a variable.

  • Pre-conditions are the conditions defined for input variables of a web method.

  • Final_condition is the last condition and obtain form logical AND of all conditions.

  • An operation can be defined for each variable.

  • Each variable can have one or more conditions.

  • Each variable can have only one operation.

  • For each variable, at least one condition or one operation should be defined.

Notations of our rules in MBAG are as below:

  • The nonterminal is surrounded by <  > .

  • The terminal is not surrounded by <  > .

  • The attribute is presented by A() for the Nonterminal.

  • Condition #n can be defined for each attribute using logical operators and “#” means the number of conditions (1,2,…,n).

  • Operation #n can be defined for each variable and “#” means the number of operations (1,2,…,n).

  • Assigning value X to attribute A() is presented by A() <—X and X can be digits or characters.

Appendix 2: The scan grammar definition

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Non-Terminal used in the scan-grammar
Full size table
Table 8 The notation of the scan-grammar
Full size table

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Habibi, E., Mirian-Hosseinabadi, SH. Sharif-TaaWS: a tool to automate unit testing of web services. Autom Softw Eng 30, 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-022-00368-4

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