Design and Implementation of a Tool to Test Service Level Agreements

In the scope of Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are technical documents that contain the conditions that must be fulfilled during the provision and consumption of services. Typically, the violation of the terms specified in the SLA leads to consequences for the stakeholders involved in the agreement. It is therefore important to assure that the Service Based Application (SBA) behaves as expected in order to avoid such consequences. In this context, the testing of SLAs is a challenging and promising area but requires a high cost in terms of effort to design the tests. Hence, it is convenient to automate as much as possible the tasks involved in the generation of the tests. To address this issue, we have designed and implemented SLACT (SLA Combinatorial Testing) tool, which takes the specification of a SLA as the test basis. SLACT automates the generation of tests by means of applying different combinatorial testing techniques. Furthermore, SLACT is able to automatically identify a set of constraints that avoid the obtaining of non-feasible tests by analyzing the information contained in the SLA guarantee terms. We have used SLACT to obtain the tests for a critical eHealth scenario, proposed in the context of a FP7 European Project.