Testing in Service Oriented Architectures with dynamic binding: A mapping study

Context: Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a new paradigm todevelop interoperable and highly dynamic applications.Objective: This paper aims to identify the state of the art in the research on testing inService Oriented Architectures with dynamic binding.Method: A mapping study has been performed employing both manual and automaticsearch in journals, conference/workshop proceedings and electronic databases.Results: A total of 33 studies have been reviewed in order to extract relevantinformation regarding a previously defined set of research questions. The detection offaults and the decision making based on the information gathered from the tests havebeen identified as the main objectives of these studies. To achieve these goals,monitoring and test case generation are the most proposed techniques testing bothfunctional and non-functional properties. Furthermore, different stakeholders have beenidentified as participants in the tests, which are performed in specific points in timeduring the life cycle of the services. Finally, it has been observed that a relevant groupof studies have not validated their approach yet.Conclusions: Although we have only found 33 studies that address the testing of SOAwhere the discovery and binding of the services are performed at runtime, this numbercan be considered significant due to the specific nature of the reviewed topic. Theresults of this study have contributed to provide a body of knowledge that allowsidentifying current gaps in improving the quality of the dynamic binding in SOA usingtesting approaches.