Software Engineering Institute

This report makes recommendations for testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations consisting of infrastructure, services, and end-to-end processes. Testing implementations of SOA infrastructure, services, and end-to-end processing in support of business processes is complex. SOA infrastructure is often composed of multiple, independently constructed commercial products—often from different vendors—that must be carefully configured to interact in an appropriate manner. Services are loosely coupled components which are intended to make minimal assumptions about where, why, and under what environmental conditions they are invoked. Business processes link together multiple services and other systems in support of specific tasks. These services and systems may operate on remote platforms controlled by different organizations and with different SOA infrastructures. Such complications make it difficult to establish appropriate environments for tests, to ensure specific qualities of service, and to keep testing up-to-date with changing configurations of platforms, infrastructure, services, and other components.