Towards a Hierarchical Testing and Evaluation Strategy for Web Services System

Web services can be combined in a collaborative way to create a new Web services system (WSS) to solve more complex problems. However, WSS testing is not a trivial task, features like distribution, loose-coupling, and collaboration bring great pressure to the latter testing activity. In the paper, a hierarchical testing and evaluation strategy is proposed from the perspective of the developers of Web services system. In service unit level, combinatorial testing method is used to ensure single service´s quality. In system level, BPEL specification is converted into state diagram firstly, and then state transition-based test cases generation algorithm is presented. Based on the testing records of the above two levels, a simple reliability evaluation method is addressed. Furthermore, the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach is validated by the preliminary study and case-based experiments.