Hazlifah Mohd Rusli
ABSTRACT
More and more Web based systems are being developed by composing other single or even composite services. This is due to the fact that not all available services are able to satisfy the needs of a user. The process of composing Web services involves discovering the appropriate services, selecting the best services, combining those services together, and finally executing them. Although much research efforts have been dedicated to the discovery, selection, and composition of services, the process of testing the Web service composition has not been given the same attention. This paper discusses the importance of Web services composition testing, provides a classification of the most prominent approaches in that area, presents several criteria for comparison of those approaches, and conducts a comparative evaluation of the approaches. The results of the paper give an essential perspective to do research work on Web services composition testing.
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Index Terms
- A comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art web service composition testing approaches
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Reviews
Boniface C Nwugwo
The term "service-oriented architecture (SOA)" has maybe only been around for ten years, but the concept of service-based distributed systems has been around for more than 25 years. In all this time, while so much has been written about SOA-most of it on the design and coding of Web services and SOAs-very little attention has been given to the latter phases of the software development life cycle that deal with testing, deploying, and managing Web services-based architectures. Actually, this is unfortunate-it shows that, in 25 years, the software industry has still not learned some serious lessons and is still treating testing as an afterthought. This explains why little attention has been given to testing Web service composition (WSC), despite all of the research efforts that have been dedicated to the discovery, selection, and composition of Web services. The authors introduce WSC and why it needs testing. They compare known major approaches for testing WSC based on the results of an earlier mapping study [1]. The approaches are model checking, path analysis constraint solver, graph search algorithms, and a couple of other WSC test generation approaches. For each approach, the authors briefly discuss the research that has been done in each area and then use that research to evaluate the approaches based on nine criteria. The authors show that most Web services testing approaches use model-based testing, where test cases are automatically generated from the defined model. They also discuss other approaches used in WSC testing: path analysis, where data is generated that causes different paths in a program to be executed; graph search algorithms, where the composition specification is transformed into graph models before test cases are derived by traversing the graph; and other approaches, such as symbolic execution and scatter search testing. This paper is a must-read for anyone who is about to embark on a test project to verify and validate WSC. The paper not only outlines WSC testing problems, such as "testing the SOAP messages, the [Web services description language, WSDL] interface, or the publish, find, and bind capability," but it also suggests that "[WSC] testing involves testing the extended interaction between the service provider and requester as well as the composition schema which defines the business logic of the composite service." The research projects for the three approaches are based on one of the two main languages created for composing Web services: business process execution language (BPEL) and the Web ontology language for services (OWL-S). The authors speculate that more research efforts are devoted to the discovery, selection, and composition of services than to the process of testing WSC. They note the sad aspect of this: despite substantive research on WSC testing, only two projects have reported the evaluation of their approaches. While little effort has been spent on services and service composition verification and validation, at least a few testing techniques for WSC applications have been recently proposed and the expectation is that such efforts will continue as we head into the future. Online Computing Reviews Service
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