A Proactive Approach to Test Service Level Agreements

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a promising solution to develop interoperable and highly dynamic applications. In the domain of SOA, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used to specify the stipulated terms between the service provider and the consumer. Due to the unique features of this paradigm such as SLA management, testing SOA presents new challenges to researchers because traditional testing techniques need to be suitably adapted. It is important for both stakeholders to develop proactive approaches that allow the detection of problems before they may later derive in SLA violations. This paper tackles the problem of testing the terms of the SLA, specified in WS-Agreement language, by introducing a stepwise method based on a well-known partition testing technique. The approach is illustrated over a case study.