A Metamorphic Testing Methodology for Online SOA Application Testing

Abstract

Testing the correctness of service integration is a step toward assurance of the quality of applications. These applications however may bind dynamically to their supportive services using the SOA pattern that share the same service interface, yet the latter services may behave differently. In addition, a service may implement a business strategy, such as best pricing, relative to the behaviors of its competitors and the dynamic market conditions. As such, defining a test oracle that specifies the absolute expected outcomes for individual test cases is hard. Many existing works ignore these issues to address the problem of identifying failures from test results. This chapter studies an approach to online testing. Service testing is divided into two steps. In the spirit of metamorphic testing, the offline step determines a set of successful test cases to construct their corresponding follow-up test cases for the online step. These test cases will be executed by metamorphic services that encapsulate the services as well as applicable metamorphic relations. Thus, any failure revealed by the approach will be a failure of the service under test.