Which SOA Testing Tool?

Posted by Mark Little on Mar 15, 2009

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SOA may or may not be dead. It may or may not be pining for the fjords. But no one can doubt that there is still a lot of unknowns surrounding what constitutes good SOA. Many vendors offer SOA Readiness tools, ostensibly to determine whether or not you are ready to adopt SOA, at what stage you are on the overall adoption curve, but are typically another way to drive vendor adoption. For instance, as the IBM assessment states:

Where does your company stand when it comes to adopting service oriented architecture (SOA)? Do you understand your current SOA level of maturity and opportunities for improvement? With targeted recommendations for improving your maturity level, the IBM SOA assessment tool can help you unlock the full value of SOA.

But once you've adopted SOA (to whatever degree) you obviously need some way of testing it. Fortunately many of the same people who brought you those handy readiness assessment tools also have a solution here. But what constitutes a good SOA testing tool(s) and do you have to be tied into specific SOA infrastructures? This is the question that Eric Roch asks. He provides some selection criteria that he uses:

• Test-aware interfaces: standardized interface and messages for testing
• Message-based test automation: record, replay and management of test scripts
• Virtualization: the ability simulate virtual service providers and consumers
• Simulation: the ability to simulate applications as part of a regression test
• Load Test: the ability to stress test applications
• Validation: pass/fail verification at the component (messaging) and application (data store) levels.
• Components: Java and/or .NET component visibility
• Introspection: WSDL and XML support to generate data and operation tests
• Management: Manage test cases, scripts, data and results
• Security: SSL, WS security federation, digital signatures
• Industry Specific Data Formats: e.g. EDI, HL7
• Continual Test: Automated build, deploy and test

A couple of years ago InfoWorld reviewed a few SOAP-based testing tools:

Fundamentally, testing a SOAP-based Web service involves three activities: constructing a SOAP request, submitting it, and evaluating the response. As easy as that sounds, it is anything but. An effective SOAP-testing tool cannot simply rely on a user-friendly mechanism for building requests. It must also enable the user to organize and arrange requests in realistic sequences, provide a means of altering request input values, and intelligently tweak requests so as to expose the Web service to a range of good and bad usage scenarios. In short, you want the tool to run the Web service through a reasonable approximation of real-world activity.

Although the industry has recognized that Web Services are just one way or approaching the technological aspects of SOA, it seems that most of the tools today still assume SOAP and WSDL.

Do you have a favourite SOA testing tool(s) or would modify Eric's criteria? Or do you know of any good tools that can be used across implementation technologies?

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   BPELUnit

   by Leif Singer

   Daniel Lübke has written a short piece for our BPELUnit Eclipse plug-in, addressing the criteria from above where applicable.

   Reply

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   soapUI

   by Rodrigo Silva

   Here it is a good one: www.soapui.org/

   Reply

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   Web service testing tools not SOA testing tools are available

   by Sashwat Gupta

   I have seen quite a few testing tools for SOA. All of them turned out to be web service testing tools.
   SOAP UI seemed to be most intuitive, but lacks quite some features.
   WS-Security still leaves a lot to be desired (improving over last few releases).
   Load testing is available
   Mocking of services is possible
   Extending the toolkit is possible (java/groovy script)
   Continual test - don't think possible
   Reporting is limited and leaves a lot to be desired
   Validation at message level is possible, but not at datastore level (can be done by custom groovy scripts)

   Reply

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   A great SOA testing tool

   by Amos Azaria

   There is this great SOA testing tool called "SOA Clenaer". It is very user friendly, and very usable. It can be used for testing SOAP REST and also WCF. it can be found at xyrow.com.

   Reply

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   My preferences - Parasoft SOATest

   by William El Kaim

   I do like a lot Parasoft SOAtest and especially the capability to create easily policies. It manages security in an easy way. It supports well JMS and REST, functional and load testing. Price can vary greatly based on your configuration.
   
   - Test-aware interfaces: standardized interface and messages for testing
   yes
   - Message-based test automation: record, replay and management of test scripts
   yes supports multiple JMS
   - Virtualization: the ability simulate virtual service providers and consumers
   yes never used
   - Simulation: the ability to simulate applications as part of a regression test
   not sure
   - Load Test: the ability to stress test applications
   yes
   - Validation: pass/fail verification at the component (messaging) and application (data store) levels.
   no
   - Components: Java and/or .NET component visibility
   no
   - Introspection: WSDL and XML support to generate data and operation tests
   yes
   - Management: Manage test cases, scripts, data and results
   Yes, file based
   - Security: SSL, WS security federation, digital signatures
   yes
   - Industry Specific Data Formats: e.g. EDI, HL7
   no
   - Continual Test: Automated build, deploy and test
   no, but can be done through scripting engine
   
   
   
   
   You can also try Actional diagnostic 8 which is limited but can provide good support.
   
   Finally, ITKO is offering with Lisa

   Reply

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