A framework for automated testing of web service choreographies

Web services are loosely-coupled software components designed to support interoperable machineto-machine interaction over the Internet. To achieve such interoperability, web services are accesible through W3C web standards, independently of which language, operation system, or hardware platform they are developed. Due to these characteristics, simple web services can be combined in more complex ones. There are two main approaches for composing services: orchestration and choreographies. In an orchestration, a central node (the orchestrator) coordinates the ow of information from other participating services. Although straightforward and simple, its centralized nature leads to scalability and fault-tolerance problems. As a solution, choreographies have been proposed as decentralized and scalable solutions for composing web services. Nevertheless, inherent characteristics of SOA such as dynamicity, third-party and governance issues, and the decentralized ow of information, make the automated testing of choreographies di cult. The goal of this research is to develop a framework for automated testing of choreographies to support Test-Driven Development (TDD) of choreographies. This framework provides a set of features to assist the choreography developer during choreography testing. Through this framework: (i) the elements (services, roles, messages) of a choreography can be manipulated as Java Objects; (ii) web service operations can be invoked dynamically; and (iii) messages exchanged in the choreography can be intercepted and analyzed. Since real choreographies involve multiple internal and external services, the framework also provides mechanisms for mocking web services or invoking them in their real environments. With this set of features, we intend to support choreography testing by providing the needed mechanisms for automating the testing of (i) atomic web services (unit testing); (ii) their integration in the choreography (integration testing); and then, (iii) a part or the whole choreography (acceptance testing).