Rationale

Digital economy spreading

A growing number of applications, systems and devices are connected and collaborate without human intermediation, allowing the automation of business processes that support daily activities and services.

Testing, the solution for:

  • How can the service consumer improve reasonably her/his confidence in the compliance of the actual service provision with exigencies and constraints stated in the service contract?
  • How can the service consumer improve reasonably her/his confidence that the provider is not vulnerable to malicious attacks that can jeopardize the resources handled in behalf of the consumer?

SOA Testing Difficulties

  • Lack of observability of the involved systems.
  • Lack of trust in the employed engineering methods.
  • Lack of direct control of the implementation lifecycles.
  • Late binding of systems; fundamental uncertainty of the test verdicts.
  • Organizational complexity; elastic demand of computational resources.
  • Increasing scale factor of the services architectures.
  • High costs and, last but not least, questionable efficacy of humans in performing manually a more and more hard and complex but boring and low rewarding activity such as testing of large distributed architectures.

Rationale

Dependable and secure Services Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are mainly the result of good design and implementation practices, but the stakeholders’ trust can be decisively strengthened only by rigorous, sound and open validation and verification processes. The contract-based, model-driven SOA engineering approach, effectively supports the validation task. But SOA key characteristics (reduced control, observability and trust between participants) make black-box and grey-box testing the only practicable verification methods and SOA testing a heavy, complex, challenging and expensive task.

The solution of the SOA testing problem can be brought only by a disruptive innovation that drastically simplifies and routinizes the testing task by implementing and offering an automated, effective, accessible and affordable testing facility.