Research And Implementation Of The Framework For Service-oriented Testing Of Web Services

Web Services (WS), being a new distributed computing model, has been developed rapidly under the support of academic and industrial realm since it brings an invocation mechanism with neutrality between platforms and languages. Despite of the active re-search on WS technology at present, many new difficulties are confronted in testing of WS comparing with testing of traditional software because of the inherent features of WS architecture.The distributed architecture of WS, including three roles which communicate with each other by SOAP messages, makes the testing of WS applications much different from traditional software testing. Although some methods are proposed to test WS from different levels and aspects, the difficulties in testing WS are still to be addressed.This paper presents a service oriented architecture for testing WS. In this architec-ture, various parties interact with each other to complete testing tasks through testing service registration, discovery and invocation. The analysis of the architecture in a typi-cal scenario shows that it has the advantages of supporting dynamic discovery and in-vocation of testing services as required by the dynamic discovery and invocation of normal functional services without compromising security, privacy and intellectual property rights. It also helps to reduce the risk of unnecessary disturbances to the nor-mal operations of services by testing activities. New testing services are easy to partici-pate in the framework with flexibility owing to the utilization of an ontology which is developed to provide an explicit description of the concepts in the field of testing of WS and to provide the foundation of the communication mechanism between services as well. The ontology is represented in OWL, facilitating the description of the testing ser-vices in Semantic Web Services technology. We designed a special service to be the coordinator of the testing work which bridged the users of the framework and the testing services participating in the testing work. Our case studies with wrapping an automated testing tool as a WS and testing a calculator Web Service demonstrated that the archi-tecture is feasible, extendable and flexible.