A Practical Approach Towards Automatic Testing of Web Services Interoperability

Abstract

Web Services are a technology designed to support the invocation of remote elements by client applications, with the goal of providing interoperable application-to-application interaction while assuring vendor and platform independence. In business-critical environments, the occurrence of interoperability issues can have disastrous consequences, including direct financial costs, reputation, and client fidelity losses. Despite this, experience shows that services interoperability is still quite difficult to achieve. The goal of this paper is to propose a practical testing process to understand the real level of interoperability provided by web services platforms. An extensible tool, that implements the proposed approach, has been used to run a large campaign during which we have tested the interoperability of a large number of web services, comprising both home-implemented and publicly available services, deployed on top of several web service platforms and against 11 client-side web service platforms. Numerous issues have been disclosed, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the importance of having an automatic tool for testing web services for interoperability.