Test-the-REST: An Approach to Testing RESTful Web-Services

Representational state transfer (REST) is an architectural style that has received significant attention from software engineers for implementing web-services due to its simplicity and scalability. By definition, web-services are distributed, headless (lacking UI) and loosely coupled. This presents the implementers and testers of web-services withchallenges, which are different from those in testing of traditionalsoftware. REST has unique characteristics like uniforminterfaces, stateless communication, caching, etc. This also necessitatestaking a fresh look at web-service testing specificallyin the context of RESTful web-services. A large informaticinfrastructure being developed within our organisation islargely based on service-oriented concepts wherein many of theservices are RESTful. As a part of a research project namedTest-the-REST (TTR), we have developed an approach fortesting RESTful web-services of the above infrastructure. Theproject yielded in a number of novel technical innovations, e.g.a scalable plugin based architecture, an extensible XML basedtest specification format, a method for reusing and composingtest cases for use-case testing etc. A prototype of TTR was usedin testing a RESTful service of the above infrastructure early inthe construction phase. Many bugs were uncovered resulting insignificant value add. In this paper, we present our experienceand insights in developing and using Test-the-REST.