Testing SOA

I came across an interesting article on testing SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) developments at Havemacwillblog. As well as looking at unit testing it looks at the peculiar issues of integration testing SOA applications:

In the pleasant but inefficient world of application silos, testing was relatively easy. You tested the silo. You unit tested the components of the application. Next you integration tested the whole. Then, if you had any qualms about performance, you stress tested the whole thing. Ultimately you gave it over for acceptance testing. Creating the test bed was not a problem.

The problem with SOA is that it’s end-to-end. The silos have gone and with them went the ability to easily set up a test bed. As you make your way down the SOA road, you will need to have much more versatile test-bed creation capabilities.

Stress testing/performance testing is also going to be a bit of a challenge as regards the test bed. Depending on how a new composite application is going to run, you will probably want the stress testing to be modeled around the whole set of end-to-end software that will quite probably span many different servers.