Automated Robustness Testing of Web Services

Web services are a popular way of implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which has gained rapid adoption and support from leading industrial players such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Testing can be used to help assure both the correctness and robustness of a web service. Because manual testing is tedious, tools are needed to automate test generation and execution for web services. This paper presents a new framework for automatically generating and executing web-service requests. Given a service provider’s WSDL, we first generate the necessary code to implement a client (service requestor). We then leverage existing automated unit test generation tools to generate unit tests and finally execute the generated unit tests, which in turn invoke the service under test. Our preliminary results show that we can quickly generate and execute webservice requests that may reveal robustness problems with no knowledge of the underlying web service implementation.