Automatic Conformance Testing of Web Services

Web Services are the basic building blocks of next generation Internet applications, based on dynamic service discovery and composition. Dedicated discovery services will store both syntactic and behavioral descriptions of available services and guarantee their compatibility with the requirements expressed by clients. In practice, however, interactions may still fail because the Web Service’s implementation may be faulty. In fact, the client has no guarantee on the quality of the implementation associated to any service description. In this paper, we propose the idea of high-quality service discovery incorporating automatic testing for validating Web Services before allowing their registration. First, the discovery service automatically generates conformance test cases from the provided service description, then runs the test cases on the target Web Service, and only if the test is successfully passed, the service is registered. In this way, clients bind with Web Services providing a compatible signature, a suitable behavior, and a high-quality implementation.