Testing-Based Process for Service-Oriented Applications

Service-Oriented Computing allows building applications by reusing web-accessible services. However, current approaches still involve a large effort both at discovery of services and their successful integration. This paper presents a novel approach to assist developers at discovery, selection and integration of services. In particular, the paper focuses on the selection method that involves two main evaluations on candidate services to achieve a concrete decision upon the most appropriate service. Initially, a syntactic Interface Compatibiliy assessment characterizes the list of candidate services according to a calculated syntactic distance to then proceed with a Behavior Compatibility evaluation that is based on a blackbox testing framework. The usefulness of the selection method is highlighted through a series of case studies.