Automatic generation of test models for web services using WSDL and OCL

Abstract

Web services are a very popular solution to integrate components when building a software system, or to allow communication between a system and third-party users, providing a flexible, reusable mechanism to access its functionalities. To ensure these properties though, intensive testing of web services is a key activity: we need to verify their behaviour and ensure their quality as much as possible, as efficiently as possible. In practise, the compromise between effort and cost leads too often to smaller and less exhaustive testing than it would be desirable. In this paper we present a framework to test web services based on their WSDL specification and certain constraints written in OCL, following a black-box approach and using property-based testing. This combination of strategies allows us to face the problem of generating good quality test suites and test cases by automatically deriving those from the web service formal description. To illustrate the use of our framework, we present an industrial case study: a distributed system which serves media contents to customers' TV screens. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.