Scenario-Based Service Specification and Testing

Abstract

Web Services is emerging as an Internet-based interoperability platform and is attracting enormous research and development efforts currently. Because one major objective of Web Services is to allow building distributed systems using Web services developed by different parties, service composition and coordination become an important part of the Web service architecture. One challenge for Web services-based system development is to ensure the correctness and quality of the services developed by different parties. Currently, Web Services only provides basic interface description and registry standards but leaves behavioral specification open. In this paper we propose to supplement Web service description with scenario-based specification so that not only the semantics and intentions of individual services, but also the interrelations between services can be codified and become easier for developers to understand. In addition, we develop a testing framework which is capable of generating testing stubs and drivers automatically based on provided scenarios, and performing test cases involving multiple, distributed Web services in a coordinated manner. In the long run, we believe our approach not only can improve the consistency and quality of Web services developed in a decentralized manner, but also can speed up the overall development process due to its support for enhanced requirements elicitation and rapid prototyping activities.