A Service Discovery Approach for Testing Dynamic SOAs

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are composed of distributed services that interact through standard interfaces, and evolve transparently to other services and users. Although such dynamicity makes SOA a promising architectural style, it prevents organizations from having complete knowledge of the SOA and of its (possibly untrusted) services. This constitutes an important restriction to the applicability of the SOA architectural style to real-time and (business-)critical services, consequently requiring new solutions to automatically discover the services that compose the SOA and to assess their behavior during execution. In this paper we present an approach for services discovery in dynamic SOAs. The discovery algorithm we propose merges information provided by different services providers and is implemented in a testing service that becomes an intrinsic part of the SOA. The practical case study presented shows the effectiveness of the solution.