ITWS: An Extensible Tool for Interoperability Testing of Web Services

Web services are supported by a set of protocols that have been designed with the main goal of providing interoperable communication to applications. In typical business-critical services environments the occurrence of interoperability issues can have disastrous consequences, including direct financial costs, reputation, and client fidelity losses. Despite this, experience suggests that interoperability is still quite difficult to achieve, since the heterogeneity of frameworks for providing web services is quite large. In addition, current tools have limited testing capabilities and, in many cases do not specialize in this problem. In this paper we present ITWS, an extensible Interoperability Testing tool for Web Services that is able to assess the interoperability of a web service, supported by any given framework. We have used ITWS to test the interoperability of a set of home-implemented TPC-App web services and a set of thousands of web services created in .NET C# against 11 client-side web service frameworks, including frameworks for mainstream programming languages. Numerous issues have been disclosed, showing the benefits of using ITWS and the importance of testing services for interoperability.