Reducing cost in regression testing of web service

Regression testing and retesting of a modified Web Service can be very costly as it tends to generates large number of test cases. Regression testing cost can be reduced significantly by identifying and testing the modified portion of the Web Service only. This avoids the costly construction of new test cases and the unproductive rerunning of existing test cases when it can be guaranteed that the unmodified code of web service will produce the same results as it produced previously. In this paper, by designing Web service graph we propose an effective method of identifying the modified areas (in this paper area means code of web service to be tested) and use this information to reduce regression testing efforts. In this process, we define and use a set of metrics to categorize the testing of Web service. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach using a case study that consisted of two steps. In the first step, we compared two versions of WSDL's to identify the inserted, modified and deleted areas of the Web services. Next, we use this information to generate the reduced test cases.