A simple approach for testing web service based applications

Abstract

The cost of developing and deploying web applications is reduced by dynamically integrating other heterogeneous self-contained web services. However, the malfunctioning of such systems would cause severe losses. This paper presents a technique for building reliable web applications composed of web services. All relevant web services are linked to the component under test at the testing time; thus, the availability of suitable web services is guaranteed at invocation time. In our technique, a web application and its composed components are specified by a two-level abstract model. The web application is represented as Task Precedence Graph (TPG) and the behavior of the composed components is represented as a Timed Labeled Transition System (TLTS). Three sets of test sequences are generated from the WSDL files, the TLTS and the TPG representing the integrated components and the whole web application. Test cases are executed automatically using a test execution algorithm and a test framework is also presented. This framework wraps the test cases with SOAP interfaces and validates the testing results obtained from the web services.