SOA testing professional services

The approaches of SOA program implementation may differ from traditional models of large-scale enterprise software development; but they share an emphasis on quality. Since your entire business relies on the SOA infrastructure it must be reliable. The situation becomes especially challenging when your SOA program involves several projects being developed simultaneously by different software development companies. In this case, delegating the entire testing responsibility to the 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. A clear quality control framework will make it easier for development teams to prepare their deliverables for acceptance testing. Focus on program level vision, a deep understanding of business requirements and early integration testing can reveal problems earlier in the development cycles when they can be fixed more easily.

One of the major SOA benefits to a business is the ability to quickly adapt IT to the changing competitive environment. On the flip side, it multiplies regression testing efforts by an order of magnitude, making automated testing the only logical method. Fortunately, by SOA’s very nature, interfaces are substantially less volatile. When developing automated regression tests and external service simulators, Exigen Services engineers utilize the same principles as for any other software development. This allows us to minimize the future maintenance cost of the testing suite itself.

SOA testing is not limited to service contract verification. Service orchestration and planning, exception handling, and especially BPM workflow definitions, could easily be as complex as any individual service and need to be thoroughly tested. While 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 a case-by-case basis, which can be achieved with SOA Application Security Testing.