Abstract:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a way of designing, developing, deploying, and managing enterprise systems where business needs and technical solutions are closely aligned. SOA offers a number of potential benefits, such as cost-efficiency and agility. However, adopting SOA is not without considerable challenges. For example, the most common way to implement a SOA-based system is with Web services, but the standards that define Web services are evolving rapidly and many of the Web services tools are still somewhat immature. There is also the question of how to leverage existing legacy assets within a SOA context. Perhaps most importantly, there are serious challenges related to the testing of SOA-based systems that must be addressed before the SOA paradigm will enjoy broad-based success.

A common misconception for testing SOA-based systems is that it is little different than testing non-SOA systems. Therefore, when migrating existing systems to SOA or creating new SOA-based systems, project managers often pay much less attention to the testing process of these systems. However, the singular nature of SOA-based applications may call for testing strategies and supporting toolsets that facilitate different approaches to testing. At the moment there are no evaluation criteria in place to assess these tools and find out if they provide the facilities that are needed to fully test SOA-based applications.

This talk outlines preliminary work towards a research agenda for testing SOA-based systems, focusing on three main areas: SOA governance, underlying technologies (such as Web services), and applying traditional testing strategies to SOA-based systems. The overall goal of this effort is to create a first draft of a broad research agenda for SOA testing. This research agenda is a "deep dive" expansion of the work from Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute on a general research agenda for SOA into the testing domain.

Keywords: software testing, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services, software engineering, enterprise systems, research agenda

Biography：

Scott Tilley is Professor & Director of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology. He also holds a cross-appointment in the College of Business as a Professor of Management Information Systems. He is a Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, working in the area of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). He is Chair of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Web Site Evolution (WSE) series of events, and the immediate Past Chair of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC). He is General Chair for the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2008), which will take place this September in Beijing, China.