Comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art approaches in web service testing

Abstract

Due to the increasing popularity of service-oriented software that are mainly developed using web service technology, web service testing is considered as an important and the fastest growing technical activity in the software engineering field. Web-service testing is required to detect errors and anomalies, and consequently improve the quality of web service-based applications. Web service-based applications have several dissimilarities in the testing process as compared to other software systems testing procedures. There are many efforts made to introduce effective web service testing approaches. However, the proposed approaches focus on different problems and achieved various degree of success. In this study, we categorize and deliberate the prominent web service testing approaches. The approaches are categorized into model-based, AI-based and semantic-based web service testing approaches. This study also presents a set of criteria used to evaluate and compare the state-of-the-art web service testing approaches and conducts the comparative evaluation. The comparative evaluation results may illuminate the strengths and gaps of the existing approach as well as give insight into the potential areas where the effectiveness of web service testing approaches can be improved.