Generating Effective Test Sequences for BPEL Testing

With the popularity of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), quality assurance of SOA applications, such as testing, has become a research focus. Programs implemented by business process execution language for Web services (BPEL), which can compose partner Web services into activities, are one popular kind of SOA applications. The unique features of BPEL programs bring new challenges into testing. Without explicit user interfaces, a BPEL test case is a sequence of messages that can be received by the BPEL program under test. Although the research on message-sequence generation and instance routing issues are very popular in testing of object-oriented programs, previous research has not studied the message sequence generation issues induced by unique features of BPEL as a new language.In this paper, we propose an approach to generating effective message sequences for testing BPEL. In particular,we model the BPEL program under test as a message sequence graph (MSG), and generate message sequences based on MSG. We performed an experimental study on our approach with six BPEL programs. The results show that the BPEL message sequences generated using our approach can effectively expose faults.