Testing advanced transactions in service-based software systems

Resum

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and its implementation as Web services (WS), provide a new computing paradigm in which functional and non-functional requirements of specialised services are published over the Internet such that they can be dynamically discovered and composed in order to create composite services that provide integrated and enhanced functionality. Web services transactions are used to ensure reliable execution of services and to maintain the consistency of data. The classical ACID model has been shown unsuitable for WS environments due to the loosely coupled and distributed nature of the process. Numerous models and protocols have been developed to deal with the new challengers of WS transactions. These aim to improve the quality of WS transactions in terms of response time efficiency, failure recovery, flexibility and support for long running and complex business applications. This thesis focuses on another quality dimension which is the testing of WS transactions. In it, the focus of testing is to detect possible faults or failures in software systems that rely on WS transactions. To that purpose, we present the Framework for Testing Transactions (F2T) which has been designed and developed for testing WS transactions. F2T has been devised to organize all the concepts involving in the process of test case design. Due to the variety of protocols and standards currently used to manage WS transactions, this thesis also presents the Abstract Transaction Model (AbTM) which is capable of modelling the transaction behaviour independently of the protocol used. F2T uses AbTM for the testing purposes. As part of the F2T development, a set of test techniques and criteria have been defined to test the isolated behaviour of the services and their dependencies (relationships) in WS transactions. These contributions have been evaluated using rigorous experiments that reveal the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed work. The evaluation includes a real industrial case study of a transactional bank application and an in-depth mutation analysis of the well-know web travel agency case study.