SOA test governance: enabling service integration testing across organization and technology borders

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the emerging paradigm in information technology. More than a true "architecture", SOA provides a general reference model for the development, deployment and management of distributed dynamic systems. Companies are progressively adopting service-oriented technology, because of its many (real or idealized) foreseen benefits, among which notably loose coupling and dynamic interoperability. Such benefits, however, can only be achieved through discipline and standardization: in this respect, SOA Governance qualifies a framework of policies, procedures, design rules and documentation standards to be enforced for ensuring that different services and components can successfully cooperate towards a shared business goal. What about testing of such composite SOA applications? Little attention has been devoted so far by researchers to SOA testing, but awareness is raising that existing techniques and tools are not adequate. Our position in this paper is that the establishment of a test governance framework is a key issue for enabling SOA testing at integration and system levels. We discuss the inter-relation between technical and "social" aspects of SOA application testing, and attempt a first abstract definition of a SOA Test Governance notion. We provide examples of proposed SOA testing approaches that, more or less explicitly, rely on a cross-organization agreed test process.