Web Services Testing

·         Thoroughly understand the requirements from the specifications.

·         List out the services provided by the vendor and the in-scope services.

·         In general companies prefer to perform handshaking testing before functional testing.

·         Prepare the request XML based on the data mapping provided by the vendor.

·         Make sure you prepare request XML using BVA and ECP testing techniques and also satisfying below conditions.

A.      All mandatory information and no optional information

B.      All mandatory information and all optional information

C.      Missing mandatory information and all optional information

·         Post the XML to vendor and validate the response XML's received from the vendor i.e., receiving success acknowledgments for the requests satisfying happy flow and Failure for the rest of XML's.

·         Validate whether the failure responses or acknowledgments carry proper error messages or not.

·         Once handshaking testing is success then go for functional testing. i.e., integrate the web service to application and invoke XML through appropriate triggering point.

·         Here validate the application generated XML with the data map; make sure all mandatory information within valid boundaries and classes exists, any optional information available in application also available in the request XML.

·         Validate the responses received and the response data to be stored in database are stored or not, also any files received in the XML are properly decoded and stored in respective places or not.

·         Validate any subsequent events to be carried out based on the vendor response are taken care by the application as expected or not.

·         Validate the application behavior when invalid XML is received from the vendor.

·         Once all results are satisfactory then go for load test by increasing the requests and also by increasing the responses with different file sizes.

Web Services advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

1. Web Services are virtually platform-independent

2. Security (such as SSL) is already built-in. HTTP has support for secure socket layer (SSL).

3. Web services are re-usable i.e., web service developed for one client can be used for another client with minimal or no changes.

4. The HTTP standard is allowing more systems to communicate with one another.

5. SOAP (built on XML) standardizes the messaging capability on different systems.

6. UDDI standardizes the publishing and finding of Web services.

7. WSDL standardizes the description of Web services so providers and requesters are speaking the same language.

Disadvantages:

1. Web service requests are larger than requests encoded with a binary protocol. The extra size is really only an issue over low-speed connections, or over extremely busy connections.

2. Connecting to the servers longer times is not possible. For this extra effort is required.

3. A server must usually rely on a timeout mechanism to determine that a client is no longer active. If a server doesn't receive a request from a client after a predetermined amount of time, it assumes that the client is inactive and removes any client information it was keeping. This extra overhead means more work for Web service developers.