An observability enhancement method of ABPEL specifications

WS-BPEL is a language which aims to conceive Business applications orchestrating a set of Web Services. Designing such applications is a difficult task since many different concepts are involved (parallelism, partner interaction, fault handling, etc.). However, some Meta-engineering techniques may help designers to improve the quality level of a specification. One of them, called Testability, helps to assess how a specification is testable by mean of different criteria or to improve a specification so that the final implementation becomes easier to test. In this paper, we focus on a well-known testability criterion called observability, which evaluates whether the set of observable events (messages with communication data) is sufficient to conclude on a verdict during the testing process. We study the observability of ABPEL (Abstract-BPEL) specifications and we describe some ABPEL observability degradation properties (ABPEL code patterns which do not respect the observability definition). From these, we propose an observability enhancement method which detects observability issues in ABPEL specifications and semi-automatically updates the code. Keywords-BPEL; testability; observability; enhancement method