Contract based, non-invasive, black-box testing of web services

Abstract

The Web service standard represents a prominent conversion of the SOA paradigm increasingly used in practice. The (not so knew) technical aspects in combination with the practices introducded by the WEB, lead new challanges in testing Web services often stated in literature. Introduced in this paper is a not invasive functional testing approach for Web services based on the Design by Contract (DbC) paradigm. By using formal semantic specification in a consequent manner we can present a generic testing approach which enables us to introduce quality metric measurements not before viable in traditional testing in a practicable way. We present results of our first basic study at the Schweizer Bundesbahn (SBB) Informatik in Bern. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.