A Research Agenda for Testing SOA-Based Systems

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a paradigm that organizes and uses distributed capabilities to bring together a technical solution to a business problem. The central concept of SOA revolves around modularized implementations of business logic known as services. SOA is different from traditional systems in that functional requirements are mapped to business process models and are implemented across different networked applications running on heterogeneous technologies and platforms. Services typically do not have user-accessible interfaces; instead, other applications invoke them programmatically in a message-based manner. One large barrier to the widespread adoption of SOA-based systems is testing. The common misconception for testing SOA-based systems is that it is little different than testing non-SOA systems. Therefore, when migrating existing systems to SOA or creating new SOA-based systems, project managers often pay much less attention to the testing process of these systems. This paper outlines a possible research agenda for testing SOA-based systems, focusing on three main areas: SOA governance, underlying technologies (such as Web services), and applying traditional testing strategies to SOA-based systems.