IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality Handles SOA Testing Challenges
Frankly, this type of testing can be a nightmare since new services are created quickly and you don't have a consistent foundation to work from. Any update to a single service can require a suite of hundreds of tests to validate that the new service works and interacts properly with other services. Therefore, automation and a great testing tool is the only way to keep pace with a SOA deployment.

IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality is an automated Web services testing tool that gives you a way to automate the testing process while addressing all these SOA testing challenges. The tool offers many ways to create Web service tests, the most common of which is to have the tool automatically generate a GUI for a given Web service. This reduces the technical complexity of testing Web services by putting you into a more familiar environment that eliminates the need to work at an API or function call level. Interacting with the Web service, testers work at functional level with a familiar GUI where users enter data, press a button to submit it, and get back a specific response from the Web service.

The tool can also generate tests directly from a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) model. No recording is necessary, as the test is created based on the business paths from the model. For those doing business process modeling, this is an easy way to leverage artifacts created early in the design stages of an SOA project.

Attached to every test is a data pool which is simply a spreadsheet of test data. Enter or import your test data and the tool cycles through all the rows of data running each one as an individual test. This lets you run multiple test cases for a given series of Web service calls, increasing your test coverage.

This functional and regression testing tool eliminates the need for manual coding with automated data correlation and data driven testing through a code-free test environment that supports a broad range of platforms. You don't have to formulate or interpret XML messages to communicate with a Web service. The tool abstracts, parses, and creates XML when required, letting you interact with the server using a tree view—not a plethora of XML test script code—making it simple for you to read and understand each test.

Traditional applications performance testing and functional testing are two different tests created in two different tools requiring two different skill sets. Functional and performance/load testing is fundamentally done the same way using IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality. Both types of tests are created using the same tool and the tests look identical. What distinguishes functional and performance/load tests from each other is the way you run the tests—functional tests run sequentially and performance tests are run in parallel. You simply arrange for multiple users to run all the functional tests simultaneously to simulate a full system load and measure response times. Thus you can do both performance and functional testing at the same time—a nice win for testers

So scrap your manual testing methods, stop pulling out what little hair you have left, and let IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality turn your SOA testing nightmares into sweet dreams of successful and automated testing of Web services.

More Resources