Dessislava Petrova-Antonova

Automation of Test Case Generation and Execution for Testing Web Service Orchestrations

Testing service orchestrations is a challenging research domain due to necessity of additional testing efforts, complementing traditional software testing. Although various testing approaches and tools have been proposed, most of them provide partial solutions covering single testing activities such as test path analysis, test case generation, Web service emulation, fault injection and so on. Following the current research direction, we have developed an integrated testing framework, called TASSA, which aims to provide end-to-end testing of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) orchestrations. This paper introduces its core capability for automation of test cases generation, execution and management implemented in an open source tool for WSDL-based testing of both single Web services and composite Web services, described with BPEL. The tools functionality includes identification of web service operations as well BPEL variables in case of service composition testing, generation of SOAP request templates, data driven testing, definition of assertions at different levels (HTTP, SOAP and BPEL variable), execution and management of test cases.

Framework for Testing Service Compositions

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a new generation of software architectures that attracts attention as promising way for smooth integration of loose coupled software applications. In addition to all benefits, it adds new dimensions to the complexity of designing, building, testing, deploying and maintaining Service-based applications (SBA). Research in verification and validation applied to compositions of web services still is not mature enough. In this paper we present a framework named TASSA for testing, and validation of both functional and non-functional behavior of service-based applications. The paper focuses on one of the TASSA tools named Isolation tool. The framework is based on SOA principles and is composable depending on user requirements.

DDAT: data dependency analysis tool for web service business processes

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a new generation of software architectures intended to integrate loosely coupled applications. In order to meet changing business goals, SOA systems incorporate multiple independent services supported by various providers. The complex structure of the resulting business processes can be defined in Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL). One of the main tasks of the quality assurance specialists during software design is testing the execution of different paths of the WS-BPEL process. In order to solve that task we propose an approach that augments the WS-BPEL process for test case generation by analyzing the conditional activities concerning given path of testing.

Towards a Unifying View of QoS-Enhanced Web Service Description and Discovery Approaches

The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why a lot of the research efforts point to discover semantic means for describing web services taking into account not only functional characteristics of services, but also the quality of service (QoS) properties such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. This motivated us to research current approaches presenting complete solutions for QoS enabled web service description, publication and discovery. In this paper we present comparative analysis of these approaches according to their common principals. Based on such analysis we extract the essential aspects from them and propose a pattern for the development of QoS-aware service-oriented architectures. The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why many research efforts point to discovering semantic approaches for describing web services including both functional and non-functional properties. This will give consumers the opportunity to find web services according to their QoS requirements such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. Most of the current solutions are based on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and Universal Description and Discovery Interface (UDDI) registry. WSDL documents provide functional description of web services without semantic specifications concerning QoS. UDDI registry provides catalog-based searching without control over the quality of registered services. UDDI APIs allow publishing and discovering data for a particular service, but do not provide an opportunity for a quality-based retrieval. The problem becomes more complicated when the discovery process returns several web services with the same functionality. Such mentioned disadvantages motivated us to research principal current approaches for QoS-aware web service description and discovery in order to find better solutions giving more accurate and productive service retrieval. These approaches have common principals that can be summarized as follows:

Integrated QoS Assessment of Web Services

The paper proposes a method that helps clients to select a web service among several ones with the same functionality based on their quality of service properties (QoS). It provides a mechanism for integrated QoS assessment of web services taking into account all measured QoS properties of interest. The method estimates the strength of the mutual dependency of the QoS properties based on the data set of QoS values accumulated during the web service monitoring. It is summarized in a step-by-step assessment procedure and is proved through a real web service selection scenario.

faultInjector: A Tool for Injection of Faults in Synchronous WS-BPEL Processes

Comparing with the testing of conventional software systems, the testing of service-oriented systems (SOS) is considerably more challenging. Fault injection is a standard software testing approach that can be applied to the SOS. It is used in this paper as a base for testing of web service business processes at communication channel level as well as message level. The proposed approach provides simulation of combination of several faults during message exchange in order to generate negative test cases. The supported types of faults are message delay, failure of the communication channel, sending or receiving a message with corrupted structure, sending or receiving a message with wrong data.

EcoLogic: IoT Platform for Control of Carbon Emissions.

Today, the sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) presence naturally in the people’s lives. Billions of interactive devices exchange information about variety of objects in the physical world. The IoT technologies affect the business processes of all major industries such as transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, etc. Despite the fact that the IoT has a positive impact to both people and industry, it also provides benefits for the environment. The IoT is recognized as a powerful tool in the fight against climate change. More specially, it has a significant potential in saving carbon emissions. Taking into account the promising areas of IoT application, this paper proposes a solution for real-time monitoring of vehicles and detection of rising levels of carbon emissions, called EcoLogic. The EcoLogic consists of hardware module that collects sensor data related to vehicles’ carbon emissions and cloud based applications for data processing, analysis and visualisation. Its primary purpose is to control the carbon emissions through smart notifications and vehicle’s power limitations.

Internet of Things Framework for Smart Home Building

Nowadays the smart home represents the most sensible form of the Internet of Things (IoT) world. The communication protocols allowing devices to share data and respond to commands using a little power and wireless connection exist over a decade. The variety of the devices and communication protocols as well as the lack of standards for their manufacturing make building of smart homes challenging task and leads to a need for implementation of integration frameworks. The paper addresses this challenge by proposing an IoT Framework for integration of short range devices, called smartFW. The smartFW framework acts as mediator between integration platforms used by the end users to control their smart homes and the connected devices in those homes. It has a flexible architecture allowing to be enriched with new application and communication protocols to enable integration of wide range of devices. The smartFW framework is based on the OSGi standard and currently supports Zigbee, EnOcean, KNX, X10, Z-Wave device communication protocols as well as Coap, MQTT and XAMPP application protocols.

Automatic generation of test data for XML schema-based testing of web services

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a widely accepted paradigm for development of distributed applications using interoperable and flexible software components. Still the preferred technology for SOA implementation is provided by the web services. Their interface as well as complex interactions are described with XML-based standards, such as Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL). The WSDL and WS-BPEL documents allow automation of test data generation through instantiation of the referenced XML Schemas. The approach proposed in this paper is a step towards such goal. It provides derivation of XML instances from a given XML Schema. The approach is automated in a software tool supporting data-driven test definition. The tool automatically extracts an XML Schema form a WSDL or WS-BPEL documents and generates XML messages needed for web service interactions. Since the proposed approach supports generation of both correct and incorrect XML instances, the tool is applicable to functional as well as robustness testing of web services.

A pattern for WSDL-based testing of web service compositions

The wide adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and its web service based implementation brings new research challenges related to development of complex business processes and their subsequent testing. The common language for definition of business processes is Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL), which provides a set of activities describing the composition of web services. Since WS-BPEL processes are consumed through their interface, described with Web Service Description Language (WSDL), a logical assumption is that that the mature testing tools for web services could be used for their automation testing. This paper proposes a pattern for WSDL-based testing of both single and composite web services. The usefulness of the pattern is proved through implementation of a software tool that automates the testing activities prescribed by the pattern.