SOA testing professional services

The approaches of SOA program implementation might differ from traditional models of monolithic large-scale enterprise software development, but in common they share emphasis on quality. Your whole business relies on your SOA infrastructure and you want to be sure in its reliability. The situation becomes especially challenging when your SOA program involves several simultaneous projects developed by different software development companies. In this case, delegating the entire testing responsibility to development teams can lead to both duplicated effort and additional risks during integration and service life cycle management. Having one centralized quality engineering team can address both concerns. Clear quality control framework will make it easier for development teams to prepare their deliverables for acceptance testing. Focus on program-level vision, deep understanding of business requirements and early integration testing can reveal problems earlier in the development cycles when they can be easily fixed.

One of the major SOA benefits for business is its ability to quickly adapt IT to the changing competitive environment. On the flip side, it multiplies regression testing efforts by the order of magnitude, test automation being the only reasonable way to fulfill it. Fortunately, in SOA, by its nature, interfaces are substantially less volatile. While developing automated regression tests and external service simulators, Exigen Services engineers utilize the same principles as for any other software development. That allows us to minimize the future maintenance cost of the test suite itself.

Of course, SOA testing is not limited to service contract verification. Service orchestration and choreography, exception handling, and especially BPM workflow definitions might easily be as complex as any individual service and need to be thoroughly tested. SOA security aspects are also very important because although standard SSL/TLS and WS-Security can provide confidentiality, integrity, and authentication for web-service communication, other important aspects like privacy, non-repudiation, and accountability still need to be dealt with on the case-by-case basis.

Whether this SOA quality team should be in-house or outsourced is highly organization-specific, but unlike many other activities, knowledge transfer in a well-defined SOA initiative is typically quite harmless. From our side, we can bring valuable expertise in the form of both a mature testing process and technical excellence. In 2008 our 10+ years of experience in general software testing and particular SOA quality engineering was recognized by The Black Book of Outsourcing by ranking Exigen Services as #1 outsourcing vendor for software testing and quality assurance.