Challenges in Audit Testing of Web Services

Audit testing of Web services is a form of regression testing that applies to the integration of external services in a service composition. When such services change, the application that integrates them needs to be regressiontested, to ensure that the existing functionalities are not broken by the service changes. This means the external services must be audited for preserved compatibility with the integration. In this paper, we analyze the main research challenges behind audit testing of services. Such challenges descend from the limited testability of external services and encompass traditional regression testing problems, such as test case selection and prioritization, for which existing solutions are nonetheless inadequate. Moreover, in the paper we discuss in detail one such challenge, i.e., the problem of defining an oracle by making the integrator´s assumptions explicit.