Proceedings of the 7th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the
ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundation of Software Engineering
(ESEC '09/FSE-17),
ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 151-160 (2009)

Data Flow Testing of Service Choreography 1

Lijun Mei 2 , W.K. Chan 3 , and T.H. Tse 2

[author-izer free download from ACM digital library]

 ABSTRACT

Service computing has increasingly been adopted by the industry, developing business applications by means of orchestration and choreography. Choreography specifies how services collaborate with one another by defining, say, the message exchange, rather than via the process flow as in the case of orchestration. Messages sent from one service to another may require the use of different XPaths to manipulate or extract message contents. Mismatches in XML manipulations through XPaths (such as to relate incoming and outgoing messages in choreography specifications) may result in failures. In this paper, we propose to associate XPath Rewriting Graphs (XRGs), a structure that relates XPath and XML schema, with actions of choreography applications that are skeletally modeled as labeled transition systems. We develop the notion of XRG patterns to capture how different XRGs are related even though they may refer to different XML schemas or their tags. By applying XRG patterns, we successfully identify new data flow associations in choreography applications and develop new data flow testing criteria. Finally, we report an empirical case study that evaluates our techniques. The result shows our techniques are promising in detecting failures in choreography applications.

Keywords: service composition, software testing, choreography, orchestration, web services, data flow testing

1. This work is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 717506 and 717308).
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.
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