ACTRESS: A Comprehensive Testing fRamEwork for Service-oriented Software

Description

Building software using service-oriented architecture and web services is increasingly popular. In this kind of software, web services use XML as the common message format to exchange information among one another in a loosely coupled manner. Developers may specify the required message types using XML Schema, which is also in XML format. XPath is an indispensable means to manipulate these documents, such as extracting the required contents from an XML message returned by a web service, or keeping the extracted contents in a variable under the right variable definition. Any mismatch among components, such as extracting the wrong contents, failing to extract any content from a correct XML message, or different interpretations of the same XML message by two collaborating web services may cause the software to function incorrectly.This project aims to develop a comprehensive testing framework to assure web services and the software applications that are built on top of web services and service-oriented architecture. We address the problems of whether developers have conducted adequate testing to assure web service-oriented software, how to generate or select useful test inputs, how to detect anomalies from test executions, and how to re-run test cases when the software has been evolved or adapted. The project builds on top of our previous research on representing XPath and XML as a kind of graphs known as XRG. We propose to develop a form of parallel composition of XRGs so that different web services can be linked together, and through the input or output ports of web services, each XRG can associate with program codes in individual services. We will analyze how program statements in one web service may indirectly associate with the program statement in another web service, and develop test adequacy criteria accordingly. We will also investigate how to generate effective test inputs based on the developed model and schedule them to test such software with a view to exposing concurrent faults in service-oriented software.