WebSob: A Tool for Robustness Testing of Web Services

Web services are a popular way of implementing a service-oriented architecture. Testing can be used to help assure both the correctness and robustness of a web service. Because manual testing is tedious, tools are needed to automate test generation and execution for web services. This paper presents WebSob, a tool for automatically generating and executing web-service requests given a service provider´s Web service description language (WSDL) specification. We have applied WebSob to freely available web services and our experiences show that WebSob can be used to quickly generate and execute web-service requests that may reveal robustness problems with no knowledge of the underlying web service implementation.