The Distribution of Testing Activities in Web Services and SOA Environment
Testing in Web services and SOA environment can be far more distributed in comparison with testing stand-alone or traditional applications. This is because such systems are composed of several hybrid components. These include Web servers and their related components, server side applications, communication services, and client side Web services. In this chapter, the authors focus on challenges and opportunities for software testing in SOA environment. They divide testing activities based on three classifications: testing activities that are going to be similar to those in traditional software development environments, testing activities that will be less usable or popular in SOA, and testing activities that will evolve significantly to adapt to the new environment. The authors believe that most generic testing activities are going to stay in any new software development environment. However, their importance, significance, challenges, and difficulties are going to be dependent on the subject environment. Some tasks will be easier to implement and test and others will either be un-applicable or difficult to test and implement in comparison with testing in traditional software development environments.