Automated Testing of Server Side Software Components

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Automated Testing of Server Side Software
Components

• Francesco Bongiovanni

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Presentation outline

• Introduction
• Motivation
• Background
• Problem statement
• Proposed approach
• General overview
• Prototypes architecture and implementation
• Evaluation and tests
• Future work and conclusion
• Questions

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Introduction Motivation I

• A correct concise definition
• Testing is the process of executing a program
  with the intent of finding errors
• Between 20 and 60 billion
• Software testing is everywhere
• 50 of time and cost
• Debugging time development time

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Introduction Motivation II

• Evaluate and improve software quality
• Software maintenance and software evolution is
  easier
• Todays applications are large and complex
• Need for automating the testing process

Courtesy of Gerard Meszaros, used with permission
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Introduction Background I

• Shopping Dossier
• Middleware framework
• Gives access to different business logics

Dossier logic
Shopping Dossier
Booking logic
...
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Introduction Background II

• Current architecture
• EJB based components
• Future architecture
• Web Services based

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Introduction Problem Statement I

• Testing such framework is complex
• Current tests include higher level layers
• A test scenario
• Can involve different business logics
• Components can be assembled into a specific flow
  of actions
• Can include complex data
• Components have different data structures
• Can have conditional logic
• In order to simulate real use cases
• Can be exercised with different test inputs
• Can be re-executed in a regression test campaign

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Proposed Approach General overview I

• Treating a test scenario as a BPEL process
• Advantages of using WS-BPEL
• Powerful language
• Allow to create complex sequence of actions
• Executable
• ...

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Proposed Approach General overview II
BPEL Process
Receive
Assign
WSDL
WSDL
WSDL
WSDL
Invoke
Invoke
WSDL
WSDL
Reply
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Proposed Approach General overview III

• Core components
• After investigations

Web Services Testing tool
Eclipse BPEL Designer
SoapUI
BPEL engine
Apache Ode
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Proposed Approach General overview IV
Web Services Testing tool (SoapUI)
Project ___TestSuite 1 ________TestCase 1 ....
BPEL engine (Apache Ode)
BPEL Process
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Proposed Approach General overview V
FAILED
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Proposed Approach Prototypes I
Web Services Testing tool (SoapUI)
SoapUI Extension
BPEL engine (Apache Ode)
BPEL Monitoring UI
SoapWUI
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Proposed Approach Prototypes II

• SoapUI Extension
• Web Service exposing several methods
• Get Projects
• Get Test suites
• Run Test suite
• ...
• Implemented using
• Apache Axis2
• Apache AXIOM
• SoapUI APIs

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Proposed Approach Prototypes III

• BPEL Monitoring Web UI
• Uses Apache Odes Web Services
• ProcessManagement
• InstanceManagement
• Implemented using
• Adobe Flex 3
• MXML
• ActionScript 3

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Proposed Approach Prototypes IV

• BPEL Monitoring Web UI

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Proposed Approach Prototypes V

• SoapWUI
• Uses the SoapUI Extension Web Service
• Implemented using
• Adobe Flex 3
• MXML
• ActionScript 3

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Proposed Approach Prototypes VI

• Visual Data Representation
• Using Flare or RaVis
• XML variables
• SOAP messages

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Evaluation and tests I

• Flexible
• Easy to use
• Ability to control the granularity of the
  complexity of a scenario
• Powerful assertions mechanisms
• Maintainable by separating the sequence flow
  and the tests
• Automation execution fully automatic
• Based on open standards
• Performance
• Indirect benefit from StAx based AXIOM

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Evaluation and tests II

• Testing such system is not trivial
• The SoapUI extension was tested using SoapUI,
  Junit and a remote debugger
• Load tests
• Error injection
• Different assertions
• SLA
• SimpleContains
• ...
• The Flex Web applications were tested using
  FlexUnit

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Future improvements I

• Deriving test cases and test data from the BPEL
  process
• Automatic verification of BPEL processes using
  Model Checkers
• Requires a formal representation of BPEL and XML
  Schema

Test data generator
Web Services Testing tool (SoapUI)
Test case generator
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Future improvements II

• Distributed testing

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Conclusion

• Web Services are suitable to automate tests
  thanks to WSDL,XML Schema...
• Dont reinvent the wheel use existing
  technologies, tools and libraries
• BPEL is valuable since it enables the modelling
  and execution of desired sequences of actions
• Testers can benefit from SoapUIs flexibility and
  extensibility, while analysts take advantage from
  an RIA technology such as Adobe Flex
• Improves the collaboration of testers and
  business analysts

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Questions

• Thank you for your attention
• ?