Test-Data Generation for Web Services Based on Contract Mutation

Software testing is one of the most important techniques used to assure the quality of Web services at present. Test-data generation is an important topic in Web services testing. The quality of test data will influence the efficiency and cost when testing Web services. Based on the contract-based mutation testing technique, this paper presents a method of automated test-data generation for Web services. First, according to the description information and contracts in WSDL documents of Web services, initial test data are generated automatically by the random method. Then the test data are selected using contract mutation testing. This method can generate a test suite meeting a certain contract mutation score, which indicates the quality and efficiency of testing. Finally, we have developed a prototype on the Microsoft .NET platform, and carried out some experiments. The results have shown that the proposed method is effective in automated test-data generation for Web services.