Automated Functional Conformance Test Generation for Semantic Web Services

We present an automated approach to generate functional conformance tests for semantic Web services. The semantics of the Web services are defined using the inputs, outputs, preconditions, effects (IOPEs) paradigm. For each Web service, our approach produces testing goals which are refinements of the Web service preconditions using a set of fault models. A novel planner component accepts these testing goals, along with an initial state of the world and the Web service definitions to generate a sequence of Web service invocations as a test case. Another salient feature of our approach is generation of verification sequences to ensure that the changes to the world produced by an effect are implemented correctly. Lastly, a given application incorporating a set of semantic Web services may be accessible through several interfaces such as 1) direct invocation of the Web services, or 2) a graphical user interface (GUI). Our technique allows generation of executable test cases which can be applied through both interfaces. We describe the techniques used in our test generation approach. We also present results which compare two approaches: an existing manual approach without the formal IOPEs information and the IOPEs-based approach reported in this paper. These results indicate that the approach described here leads to substantial savings in effort with comparable results for requirements coverage and fault detection effectiveness.