Generating an Automated Test Suite by Variable Strength Combinatorial Testing for Web Services

Abstract

Testing Web Services has become the spotlight of software engineering as an important means to assure the quality of Web application. Due to lacking of graphic interface and source code, Web services need an automated testing method, which is an important part in efficiently designing and generating test suite. However, the existing testing methods may lead to the redundancy of test suite and the decrease of fault-detecting ability since it cannot handle scenarios where the strengths of the different interactions are not uniform. With the purpose of solving this problem, firstly the formal tree model based on WSDL is constructed and the actual interaction relationship of each node is made sufficient consideration into, then the combinatorial testing is proposed to generate variable strength combinatorial test suite based on One-test-at-a-time strategy. At last test cases are minimized according to constraint rules. The results show that compared with conventional random testing, the proposed approach can detect more errors with the same amount of test cases which turning out to be more ideal than existing ones in size.

Keywords

• testing Web Services
• automated testing
• combinatorial testing
• WSDL
• constraint rules