Adjusting Testing for SOA
Planning, tools, funding key to solving complex problem
By David S. Linthicum
August 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 6)
The need to figure out new ways to approach testing in the world of service-oriented architecture takes center stage as SOA deployments increase exponentially. To test SOA in the real world, not much changes, and a lot changes at the same time. We don’t toss out traditional testing approaches, techniques and tools, but we need to rethink the concepts and technology behind SOA and adjust accordingly.
Testing SOAs is a complex, distributed computing problem. You need to learn how to isolate, check and integrate, assuring that things work at the service, persistence and process layers. The foundation to SOA testing is to select the right tool for the job, have a well-thought-out plan, and spare no expense in testing cycles or else risk that your SOA will fail.
Organizations are beginning to roll out their first instances of SOA, typically as smaller projects. While many work fine, some are not living up to expectations due to quality issues that could have been prevented with adequate testing. You need to take these lessons, hard-learned by others, and make sure that testing is high on your priority list when you dive into SOA.
Defining SOA
First, let me put forth my definition of SOA, so we have a foundation.
In short, a SOA is a strategic framework of technology that allows all interested systems, inside and outside of an organization, to expose and access well-defined services that may be furthermore abstracted to orchestration layers and composite applications. The primary benefits of a SOA are an agile architecture that’s changeable around changes to the core business processes, and reuse of services from application to application, domain to domain.
Certainly, this is not the only definition; however, it’s good enough for our discussion of SOA testing.
SOA allows enterprises to share common application services as well as information. This sharing is accomplished either by defining application services that can be shared and therefore integrated, or by providing the infrastructure for such application-service sharing. Application services can be shared either by hosting them on a central server or by accessing them interapplication (for example, through Web services).
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