Strategies for the Run-Time Testing of Third Party Web Services

Because of the dynamic way in which service-oriented architectures are configured, the correct interaction of service users and service providers can only be fully tested at run-time. However, the run-time testing of web services is complicated by the fact that they may be arbitrarily shared and may have lifetimes which are independent of the applications that use them. In this paper we investigate this situation by first identifying the different types of tests that can be applied to services at run-time and the different types of web services that can be used in service-oriented systems. We then discuss how these can be combined - identifying the combinations of tests and web services that make sense and those that do not. The resulting analysis identifies six distinct forms of run-time testing strategy of practical value in service-oriented systems.