SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is the backbone for enterprise systems today. With businesses relying on IT systems, a robust SOA is necessary to the system can operate seamlessly. This makes it essential to test the SOA to find out if it can effectively support the system.

SOA testing

A service would have an architecture that is multi-layered. The entire architecture needs to be tested and this type of testing is referred to as SOA testing. Bahaa Al Zubaidi presents basic facts about SOA testing:

  • SOA is formed by software components, legacy apps, mid-tier components, and the back end.
  • All facets of the operations along with the integration framework needs to be tested in SOA testing.
  • The integration layers are the focus areas of testing as compared to just the functionality.
  • The technical team needs to be properly trained on SOA tools and the technology. This would enable them to create test cases.
  • The SLA’s need to be considered while creating the test plan for SOA testing.

There are a number of challenges involved in SOA testing.

  • The multilayer architecture throws up a challenge that of isolating defects.
  • Load prediction can be a bit difficult since services are interdependent between interfaces.
  • The data needs are complex because the testing covers multiple systems.
  • The multi-service integration makes security testing challenging.

Why do SOA testing?

The following benefits explain why SOA testing needs to be done.

  • Functional reusability is a benefit that reduces costs.
  • Use of SOA helps in creating reliable apps. This is possible because it is easy to debug shortcode as compared to large codes.
  • Maintenance becomes easy with SOA testing, since the approach is self-contained.
  • SOA makes use of services from different sources. This makes it a platform-independent system for testing.
  • Scalability is a significant benefit of SOA testing since services can run on multiple servers.

How is it done?

The SOA testing methodology would involve the following steps:

  1. Analyzing the requirements.
  2. Creating the test strategy and making the test plan.
  3. Setting up the test environment.
  4. Execution of the tests and reporting the results.

SOA testing is made easier by the use of various tools. Some popular tools include SoapUI, cURL, and Apache JMeter. While choosing the tool factors to be considered are:

  • Support for multiple transport protocols.
  • Multi messaging support.
  • Automated generation of requests.
  • Service enforcement that is QoS-enabled.
  • Responses validation by using assertions.

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