Testing of Service-Oriented Architectures - A practical approach

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have recently emerged as a new promising paradigm for supporting distributed computing. Testing SOAs is very challenging and automated test tools can help to reduce the development costs enormously. In this paper we will propose an approach as to how automatic testing for SOAs can be done. We will introduce a Meta language in XML, which allows defining test cases for services. This paper focuses on a real life prototype implementation called SITT (Service Integration Test Tool). It has the possibility to test and monitor if certain workflows between multiple service endpoints really behave as described with the XML Meta language. This paper shows how SITT is designed and we will present its features by introducing a real-world application scenario from the domain of Telecommunications providers, namely "Mobile Number Portability".