Service Testing

Services need to undergo the same types of testing and quality assurance cycles as traditional custom-developed applications. However, in addition, there are new requirements that introduce the need for additional testing methods and effort. For example, to support the realization of the Service Composability principle, newly delivered services need to be tested individually and as part of service compositions. Agnostic services that provide reusable logic especially require rigorous testing to ensure that they are ready for repeated usage (both concurrently as part of the same service compositions and by different service compositions).

Below are examples of common Service Testing considerations:

• What types of service consumers could potentially access a service?
• Will the service need to be deployed in a cloud environment?
• What types of exception conditions and security threats could a service be potentially subjected to?
• Are there any security considerations specific to public clouds that need to be taken into account?
• How well do service contract documents communicate the functional scope and capabilities of a service?
• Are there SLA guarantees that need to be tested and verified?
• How easily can the service be composed and recomposed?
• Can the service be moved between on-premise and cloud environments?
• How easily can the service be discovered?
• Is compliance with any industry standards or profiles (such as WS-I profiles) required?
• If cloud deployed, are there proprietary characteristics being imposed by the cloud provider that are not compatible with on-premise service characteristics?
• How effective are the validation rules within the service contract and within the service logic?
• Have all possible service activities and service compositions been mapped out?
• For service compositions that span on-premise and cloud environments, is the performance and behavior consistent and reliable?

Because services are positioned as IT assets with runtime usage requirements comparable to commercial software products, similar quality assurance processes are generally required.