How validation can help in testing business processes orchestrating web services

Validation and testing are important in developing correct and fault free SOA-based systems. BPEL is a high level language that makes it possible to implement business processes as an orchestration of web services. In general, the testing requires much more test scenarios than the validation. However, in the case of BPEL processes, which have very simple and well structured implementation, test scenarios limited to the validation may also be efficient. The paper describes an experiment that aims at answering a question whether or not the validation test scenarios are also adequate for testing an implementation of BPEL processes. The experiment employs a Software Fault Injector for BPEL Processes that is able to inject faults when the test scenarios are running. The results of the experiment seem very promising. Hence, it seems that validation tests might give a strong support for testing.