WSDL mutation for testing web services

Abstract

Web Services represent a recent promising software technology that provides application-to-application interaction. Web Services are described using Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration directory provides a registry of Web Services descriptions. Testing Web Services is important for both the Web Service provider and the Web Service user. This paper proposes a technique for testing Web Services using mutation analysis. The technique is based on applying mutation operators to the WSDL document in order to generate mutated Web Service interfaces that will be used to test Web Service. For this purpose, we define selective mutant operators that are specific to WSDL documents. Our empirical results have shown the usefulness of this technique.