Whitening SOA Testing

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. Fueling that growth is the availability of independent web services that can be cost-effectively composed with other services to provide richer functionality. The reasons that make these systems easier to build, however, also make them more challenging to test. Independent web services usually provide just an interface, enough to invoke them and develop some general (black-box) tests, but insufficient for a tester to develop an adequate understanding of the integration quality between the application and independent web services. To address this lack we propose a "whitening" approach to make web services more transparent through the addition of an intermediate coverage service. The approach, named Service Oriented Coverage Testing (SOCT), provides a tester with feedback about how a whitened service, called a Testable Service, is exercised. In this paper we introduce the SOCT approach, implement an instance of it, and perform a preliminary study to show its feasibility and potential value. SOCT enables SOA white-box testing, while maintaining SOA flexibility, dynamism and loose coupling.