Taking advantage of service selection: A study on the testing of location-based web services through test case prioritization

Dynamic service compositions pose new verification and validation challenges such as uncertainty in service membership. Moreover, applying an entire test suite to loosely coupled services one after another in the same composition can be too rigid and restrictive. In this paper, we investigate the impact of service selection on service-centric testing techniques. Specifically, we propose to incorporate service selection in executing a test suite and develop a suite of metrics and test case prioritization techniques for the testing of location-aware services. A case study shows that a test case prioritization technique that incorporates service selection can outperform their traditional counterpart - the impact of service selection is noticeable on software engineering techniques in general and on test case prioritization techniques in particular. Furthermore, we find that points-of-interest-aware techniques can be significantly more effective than input-guided techniques in terms of the number of invocations required to expose the first failure of a service composition.