Towards a metamorphic testing methodology for service-oriented software applications

Testing applications in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments needs to deal with issues like the unknown communication partners until the service discovery, the imprecise black-box information of software components, and the potential existence of non-identical implementations of the same service. In this paper, we exploit the benefits of the SOA environments and metamorphic testing (MT) to alleviate the issues. We propose an MT-oriented testing methodology in this paper. It formulates metamorphic services to encapsulate services as well as the implementations of metamorphic relations. Test cases for the unit test phase is proposed to generate follow-up test cases for the integration test phase. The metamorphic services invoke relevant services to execute test cases and use their metamorphic relations to detect failures. It has potentials to shift the testing effort from the construction of the integration test sets to the development of metamorphic relations.