The HexSOA Test Model (HSTM)

The HexSOA Test Model (HSTM)

1. Introduction

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is rapidly becoming a mainstream approach to enterprise systems design. However, organizations encounter several challenges as they attempt to truly effectuate the paradigm shift towards SOA. Web Services are the foundations of modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and typically include message exchange between a consumer and a producer using SOAP request and responses over the ubiquitous HTTP protocol.

2. Problem Definition Re-Statement

Though SOA has its own advantages, there are some critical challenges that are faced in SOA Testing areas. The questions generally posed by an organization are:

How can we assure the quality of the business services that we build?
How can we validate the business process that flows across application stacks and technologies?
How can we change our testing methodologies from traditional screen centric approach to integration centric SOA approach?
How can we ensure services meet SLAs?
How do we ensure that services scale up in production?

3. Solution Proposition

One way to address the above challenges is through the use of effective SOA testing methodologies and SOA aware testing tools for the services deployed under an agile organization's SOA fabric. Instead of executing error-prone and time-consuming manual tests at the end of service’s development cycles, automated test execution should happen in parallel with the SDLC phases for the services layers.

An effective and proper unit, integration, system, functional, regression and process level testing that runs in parallel with SDLC phases will increase the SOA software team’s confidence. Additionally, the target system will deliver functionality in a robust, scalable, interoperable and secure manner.

End-to-end SOA testing involves validating an entire business process path to assure that the integration services result in the intended execution of transactions, interactions and data transformations and are interoperable across multiple platforms, transport protocols, ESBs, language interfaces and messages. These will eventually aid in validating the linkages and integrations between business services and operational systems to achieve SLAs targets.

The Hexaware Solution Approach

To address these challenges and assure the quality of SOA applications, Hexaware has evolved an automated SOA testing framework called “HexSOA Test Model”. This test model was developed based on the challenges, lessons learnt and best practices derived from our previous SOA Testing assignments. This framework created by Hexaware Independent Testing Services (HITS) can prove invaluable to agile organi-zations implementing SODA (Services-Oriented Development of Applications). Also, this model will be useful for the SODA software teams who require an effective automated framework like “HexSOA Test Model” to smoothen the transition.

Using this framework, organizations can perform both unit test for fine grained, "atomic" services as well as integration test loosely coupled and coarse grained business services that orchestrate the granular services. Since change is constant, SOA development teams can automatically execute the service’s original set of test cases to ensure quality immediately as peripheral changes are being made constantly.

Testing services in a SODA environment is slightly different from testing ordinary software components in a traditional application. One of the main differences is that services are generally reusable implementations of business processes that orchestrate the functionality within lower-level components and other finer-grained services with limited visibility of inner services and its infrastructure to SOA testers.

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