ABSTRACT

Programs using service-oriented architecture (SOA) often feature ultra-late binding among components. These components have well-defined interfaces and are known as web services. Messages between every pair of web services dually conform to the output interface of a sender and the input interface of a receiver. Unit testing of web services should not only test the logic of web services, but also assure the correctness of the web services during input, manipulation, and output of messages. There is, however, little software testing research in this area. In this paper, we study the unit testing problem to assure components written in orchestration languages, WS-BPEL in particular. We report an empirical study of the effectiveness of the Frankl-Weyuker data flow testing criteria (particularly the all-uses criterion) on WS-BPEL subject programs. Our study shows that conventional data flow testing criteria can be much less effective in revealing faults in interface artifacts (WSDL documents) and message manipulations (XPath queries) than revealing faults in BPEL artifacts. Keywords: WS-BPEL; XPath; data flow testing

1. This research is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 111107, 123207, 717308, and 717506) and a discovery grant of the Australian Research Council (project no. DP0984760). 2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong. 3. (Corresponding author.) Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong. Email: 4. Centre for Software Analysis and Testing, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. It is with deep regret and sadness that we report the passing of F.-C. Kuo on October 6, 2017.

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