Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Web Services Testing

By: Mark Lewis-Prazen



Exploring Testing Issues
• A key to testing Web services is ensuring their functional quality, because when you string together a set of services, you introduce many more opportunities for error or failure
• Developers are typically poorly versed in security – coding scrutiny driven by performance issues
• Few development organizations within enterprise IT shops understand need for vulnerability testing
• Testing was the last bastion of the waterfall method. But even here the concept of a “freeze” is ending;



Functionality Testing Challenges (cont’d).
• Web services have more APIs (one per service) and increased communication paths between those services
• Increased level of integration and interoperability testing
• Who owns this testing? Service provider? Service requester? Both? Others?
• How does trust get established?

Publish, Find and Bind Testing Challenges
• Similar to testing 3rd party credit card application processing thru a web app
• Are services able to register themselves?
• Can web app find and bind with services?
• Who owns the tests? Provider? Requestor?
• Trust issue?


Performance Testing Challenges
• All these loosely-coupled, platform-independent, highly scalable services are not free
• Major performance problems typically are a result of :
– Large services without adequate hardware support
– Small services with significant overhead
– Layer on layer; abstraction on abstraction
– Services distributed on a network with its own latency

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Web Services Testing