Towards automated WSDL-based testing of Web services

With the emergence of service-oriented computing, proper approaches are needed to validate a Web Service (WS) behaviour. In the last years several tools automating WS testing have been released. However, generally the selection of which and how many test cases should be run, and the instantiation of the input data into each test case, is still left to the human tester. In this paper we introduce a proposal to automate WSDL-based testing, which combines the coverage of WS operations with data-driven test case generation. We sketch the general architecture of a test environment that basically integrates two existing tools: soapUI, which is a popular tool for WS testing, and TAXI, which is a tool we have previously developed for the automated derivation of XML instances from a XML Schema. The test suite generation can be driven by basic coverage criteria and by the application of some heuristics, aimed in particular at systematically combining the generated instance elements in different ways, and at opportunely varying the cardinalities and the data values used for the generated instances.