Runtime Integration and Testing for Highly Dynamic Service Oriented ICT Solutions -- An Industry Challenges Report

Modern Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions are often widely distributed and highly dynamic service oriented architectures (SOA) with stringent availability requirements. Availability implies that SOA must be reconfigured, updated and maintained during runtime, while retaining their overall operational integrity. This requires that much of the adaptation, integration, configuration and testing activities typically performed offline, during development time, now have to be done online, during runtime. Current component-based runtime platforms such as SOA realize the technological foundations for runtime reconfiguration and maintenance.However, because software engineering methodology has not kept pace with the rapid leap forward in platform technology, adequate methods, techniques and tools for dealing with runtime integration and testing are not yet available.This paper discusses the industry challenges and open issues of integrating and testing SOA infrastructures during runtime.