A Framework for Automated and Composable Testing of Component-based Services

International audienceThe vision of service-oriented computing has been largely developed on the fundamental principle of building systems by composing and orchestrating services in their flow of control. Therefore, software development is nowadays notably influenced by service-oriented architectures (SOAs), in which the quality of software systems is determined by the quality of the involved services and their actual composition. Despite the efforts on improving their individual quality, adding or replacing services in an evolving system can introduce failures, thus compromising the satisfaction of the system's functional and extra-functional requirements, which is translated as a lack of trust in the SOA vision. Thus, a key issue for the industrial adoption of SOA is providing service providers, integrators, and consumers the means to build confidence that services behave according to the contracted quality conditions. In this paper we present a first version of PASCANI, a framework for specifying and executing automated, composable, and traceable test specifications for service-oriented systems. From a test specification, PASCANI generates a configuration of testing services compliant with the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification, that can be composed to integrate different testing strategies, being their tests traceable in an automated way. Our evaluation results show the applicability of the framework and a substantial gain in the tester's effort for developing tests