Improving Web Services Robustness

Developing robust web services is a difficult task. Field studies show that a large number of web services are deployed with robustness problems (i.e., presenting unexpected behaviors in the presence of invalid inputs). Several techniques for the identification of robustness problems have been proposed in the past. This paper proposes a mechanism that automatically fixes the problems detected. The approach consists of using robustness testing to detect robustness issues and then mitigate those issues by applying inputs verification based on well-defined parameter domains, including domain dependencies between different parameters. This integrated and fully automatable methodology has been used to improve three different implementations of the TPC-App web services. Results show that this tool can be easily used by developers to improve the robustness of web services implementations.