Web services choreography testing using semantic service description

Abstract

Web services have become popular due to their ability to integrate with and to interoperate heterogeneous applications. Several web services can be combined into a single application to meet the needs of users. In the course of web services selection, a web candidate service needs to conform to the behaviour of its client, and one way of ensuring this conformity is by testing the interaction between the web service and its user. The existing web services test approaches mainly focus on syntax-based web services description, whilst the semantic-based solutions mostly address composite process flow testing. The aim of this research is to provide an automated testing approach to support service selection during automatic web services composition using Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). The research work began with understanding and analysing the existing test generation approaches for web services. Second, the weaknesses of the existing approaches were identified and addressed by utilizing the choreography transition rules of WSMO in an effort to generate a Finite State Machine (FSM). The FSM was then used to generate the working test cases. Third, a technique to generate an FSM from Abstract State Machine (ASM) was adapted to be used with WSMO. This thesis finally proposed a new testing model called the Choreography to Finite State Machine (C2FSM) to support the service selection of an automatic web service composition. It proposed new algorithms to automatically generate the test cases from the semantic description (WSMO choreography description). The proposed approach was then evaluated using the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service WSMO description. The quality of the test cases generated using the proposed approach was measured by assessing their mutation adequacy score. A total of 115 mutants were created based on 7 mutant operators. A mutation adequacy score of 0.713 was obtained. The experimental validation demonstrated a significant result in the sense that C2FSM provided an efficient and feasible solution. The result of this research could assist the service consumer agents in verifying the behaviour of the Web service in selecting appropriate services for web service composition.