S-test: A framework for services testing

Abstract

The advance in Cloud services development has led to a paradigm shift in which different heterogeneous components and platforms can connect and collaborate to solve business problems. This advancement adds a new level of abstraction to the existing stack of technologies and development methodologies, but it adds also new challenges. One such a big challenge is testing. From the consumers prospective, a service is a black box that needs to be tested before being used, mainly to confirm service providers claims concerning the quality of their services. By calling a service, we delegate part of our business logic to an external provider to do it for us. Thus, we have no control over what could happen during the execution of that part of the system. To this end, many testing approaches and techniques have been proposed in the literature to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a framework to help integrate the different testing techniques. The main idea is that depending on the consumers context, one testing technique could be more helpful than another; therefore, providing a framework in which all the techniques could be integrated would help the consumers decide which one is more effective for their particular cases.