Comments on: SOA and Software Testing

By: Maxim Shevertalov

Maxim Shevertalov — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:43:38 +0000

Granted the state space explosion is what limits testing and SOA may add on to that. We would all love to get full path coverage across our test suite. What I am not sure about is that SOA testing is really that much different from integration testing. For example, if you take a bunch of COTS code and put it all together into an app is you testing going to be harder if you use SOA, CORBA, your own custom packet solution, or function calling to connect all of those pieces together? I just feel that SOA is another word for doing something that’s been around for a while. I don’t really see SOA as a new way of doing things, but a standard way to have components communicate with one another. Hopefully this standard will survive and we won’t be reinventing it in a few years with a new name.

By: Admin

Admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:37:10 +0000

There are many issues here and some include design considerations. In so far as SOA components are stateful the more complex their testing is. You couldn’t really pass state effectively through a file system (without suffering impossible latency) so it differs significantly in that way. It may also differ significantly in terms of the number of paths through the code. Ultimately the complexity of testing relates to the number of paths that need testing.

By: Maxim Shevertalov

Maxim Shevertalov — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:21:52 +0000

Interesting article. I agree with the point that testing SOA may be harder because now the whole system is distributed, but I think in someways that has forced the creation of lots of testbed suites. Also by moving everything to SOAP, one unifies how the new application communicates, thus enabling developers to create unified test suites. I what you are saying is that by adding another layer on top of the application means you have to test that in addition to testing the original app underneath. If that’s the case then I agree, but I’m not sure how that changes the fundamental practice of testing and it is by no means limited to SOA. If for some reason you wanted to connect application components via files, wouldn’t you have to test that layer as well?