Introducing service-oriented coverage testing

Testing of service-oriented systems is challenged by loose coupling and high dynamism, which are the founding characteristics of this emerging paradigm. Traditional test approaches needs to be revised for such systems, and in particular white-box techniques cannot be applied because services only grant black-box access. We introduce here a novel methodology, called SOCT (service-oriented coverage testing), that adapts the notion of coverage testing to the service-oriented domain, by exploiting the very features of service technology. In SOCT, both the probes inserted into the instrumented service code, and the retrieval of coverage-related information are themselves implemented as pure service invocations. A TCov service is published that makes available these coverage-related services through a WSDL interface. This simple idea elegantly enables the usage of practical test adequacy criteria also to service-oriented applications. In this paper a realization of SOCT is exemplified for coverage testing of BPEL orchestrations, and is illustrated on the case study of the Virtual Scientific Bookstore.