Towards a Hierarchical Testing and Evaluation Strategy for Web Services System

Web services can be combined in a collaborative way to create a new Web services system (WSS) to solve more complex problems. However, WSS testing is not a trivial task, features like distribution, loose-coupling, and collaboration bring great pressure to the latter testing activity. In the paper, a hierarchical testing and evaluation strategy is proposed from the perspective of the developers of Web services system. In service unit level, combinatorial testing method is used to ensure single service's quality. In system level, BPEL specification is converted into state diagram firstly, and then state transition-based test cases generation algorithm is presented. Based on the testing records of the above two levels, a simple reliability evaluation method is addressed. Furthermore, the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach is validated by the preliminary study and case-based experiments.