Automated testing and response analysis of web services

Web services are a popular way of implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which has gained rapid adoption and support from leading companies in industry. Testing can be used to help assure both the correctness and robustness of a web service. Because manual testing is tedious, tools are needed to automate test generation and execution for web services. This paper presents a framework and its supporting tool for automatically generating and executing web-service requests and analyzing the subsequent request-response pairs. Given a service provider's Web Service Description Language (WSDL) specification, we first automatically generate necessary Java code to implement a client (service requestor). We then leverage automated unit test generation tools for Java to generate unit tests (including extreme, special, and random input values), and execute the generated unit tests, which in turn invoke the service under test. Finally we analyze the large number of request-response pairs from the web service invocation and identify robustness problems. We have applied our framework to freely available web services and our experiences show that we can quickly generate and execute web-service requests that may reveal robustness problems with no knowledge of the underlying web service implementation.