skip to main content
10.1145/1985394.1985398acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Towards efficient measuring of web services API coverage

Published: 23 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We address the problem of interface-based test coverage for Web services. We suggest an approach to analyze the Application Programming Interface (API) of Web services, calculate the number of possible input combinations and compare it to the number of actual historical invocations. Such API coverage metrics are an indicator to which extent the service has been used. Measuring API coverage is a key concern for assessing the significance of Verification and Validation (V&V) techniques; on the other hand, API coverage metrics can also yield interesting usage reports for a service-based system in production use. The coverage metrics rely on the exact specification of service interfaces, and we provide a mechanism to specify restrictions for data types in the Java Web services framework (JAX-WS). As full enumeration of all possible inputs is often infeasible, we allow the definition of custom coverage metrics by means of domain partitioning: the user divides domain ranges into subsets, and a coverage of 100% means that the logged invocations contain at least one sample for each subset. Based on a prototype implementation, we evaluate different aspects of our approach.

References

[1]
X. Bai, W. Dong, W.-T. Tsai, and Y. Chen. WSDL-based automatic test case generation for Web services testing. In Int. Workshop Service-Oriented Syst. Eng., pages 215--220, 2005.
[2]
X. Bai, Y. Wang, G. Dai, W.-T. Tsai, and Y. Chen. A framework for contract-based collaborative verification and validation of web services. In CBSE '10, pages 258--273, 2007.
[3]
L. Baresi and E. D. Nitto. Test and Analysis of Web Services. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 2007.
[4]
C. Bartolini, A. Bertolino, S. Elbaum, and E. Marchetti. Whitening SOA Testing. In ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE '09, 2009.
[5]
C. Bartolini, A. Bertolino, E. Marchetti, and A. Polini. WS-TAXI: A WSDL-based Testing Tool for Web Services. In ICST 2009, pages 326--335, 2009.
[6]
B. Beizer. Software testing techniques (2nd ed.). Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, USA, 1990.
[7]
A. Bertolino, J. Gao, E. Marchetti, and A. Polini. Automatic Test Data Generation for XML Schema-based Partition Testing. In Int. Workshop Automation of Software Test, 2007.
[8]
R. V. Binder. Testing object-oriented systems: models, patterns, and tools. Addison-Wesley Longman, 1999.
[9]
G. Canfora and M. Di Penta. Testing Services and Service-Centric Systems: Challenges and Opportunities. IT Professional, 8(2):10--17, 2006.
[10]
J. Garcïa-fanjul, J. Tuya, and C. D. L. Riva. Generating Test Cases Specifications for BPEL Compositions of Web Services Using SPIN. In WS-MaTe 2006, pages 83--94, 2006.
[11]
W. Hummer, O. Raz, O. Shehory, P. Leitner, and S. Dustdar. Test coverage of data-centric dynamic compositions in service-based systems. In 4th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, 2011.
[12]
A. Jorgensen and J. Whittaker. An API Testing Method. In STAREAST Conf. on Softw. Testing Analysis & Review, 2000.
[13]
D. Lübke, L. Singer, and A. Salnikow. Calculating BPEL Test Coverage Through Instrumentation. In Int. Workshop on Automation of Software Test, pages 115--122, 2009.
[14]
L. Mei, W. Chan, and T. Tse. Data flow testing of service-oriented workflow applications. In ICSE, 2008.
[15]
M. P. Papazoglou, P. Traverso, S. Dustdar, and F. Leymann. Service-Oriented Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges. Computer, 40(11):38--45, 2007.
[16]
J. O. Paul Ammann. Introduction to Software Testing. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
[17]
W. T. Tsai, Y. Chen, R. Paul, N. Liao, and H. Huang. Cooperative and Group Testing in Verification of Dynamic Composite Web Services. In COMPSAC, pages 170--173, 2004.
[18]
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML Path Language (XPath). http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/, 1999.
[19]
W. Xu, J. Offutt, and J. Luo. Testing Web Services by XML Perturbation. In 16th IEEE Int. Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pages 257--266, 2005.

Cited By

View all
  • (2013)Testing elastic systems with surrogate modelsProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Combining Modelling and Search-Based Software Engineering10.5555/2662572.2662577(8-11)Online publication date: 19-May-2013
  • (2013)Fifty Shades of Grey in SOA TestingProceedings of the 2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops10.1109/ICSTW.2013.26(154-157)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2013
  • (2013)Testing elastic systems with surrogate models2013 1st International Workshop on Combining Modelling and Search-Based Software Engineering (CMSBSE)10.1109/CMSBSE.2013.6604429(8-11)Online publication date: May-2013
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Towards efficient measuring of web services API coverage

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      PESOS '11: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented Systems
      May 2011
      68 pages
      ISBN:9781450305914
      DOI:10.1145/1985394
      • Program Chairs:
      • Manuel Carro,
      • Dimka Karastoyanova,
      • Grace Lewis,
      • Anna Liu
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 23 May 2011

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. api coverage metrics
      2. tecos framework
      3. web services

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      ICSE11
      Sponsor:
      ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering
      May 23 - 24, 2011
      HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

      Upcoming Conference

      ICSE 2025

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2013)Testing elastic systems with surrogate modelsProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Combining Modelling and Search-Based Software Engineering10.5555/2662572.2662577(8-11)Online publication date: 19-May-2013
      • (2013)Fifty Shades of Grey in SOA TestingProceedings of the 2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops10.1109/ICSTW.2013.26(154-157)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2013
      • (2013)Testing elastic systems with surrogate models2013 1st International Workshop on Combining Modelling and Search-Based Software Engineering (CMSBSE)10.1109/CMSBSE.2013.6604429(8-11)Online publication date: May-2013
      • (2013)Testing of data‐centric and event‐based dynamic service compositionsSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.149323:6(465-497)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2013

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media