Testing Web-Services Using Test Sheets

As software services become the dominant platform for enterprise computing and B2B/B2C applications, testing their correctness and dependability assumes ever more importance. However, unlike the languages used to define and realize them, the languages used to test service-based systems have changed little over recent years. Today, tests for services and service-oriented architectures are still typically written using approaches such as xUnit or Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) developed for traditional software. While programmatic approaches allow the full power of object-oriented programming to be used to define tests, they are only intelligible to IT experts. Model-based test representation techniques such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) testing profile and the TTCN-3 visualization features are understandable by more stakeholders but provide only partial descriptions of tests and do not scale well beyond simple algorithms. In this paper we present a new approach to software service testing which combines the expressive power of tabular tests specification techniques like Framework for Integrated Test (FIT) with programmatic techniques like xUnit and TTCN-3. The new approach also integrates test definition with test result specification and evaluation. This allows non-IT experts to define and run tests and integrates testing more tightly into the service-oriented development process.