SOA Grey Box Testing -- A Constraint-Based Approach

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) offer attractive advantages in respect of reusability, interoperability and dynamics, and are nowadays widely accepted in industry. Achieving established software quality levels also with SOAs, while mandatory, is challenging, as, for instance, a SOA's dynamics and heterogeneity exacerbate verification issues like observability, controllability, and distribution. Regarding verification, we thus have to evolve available technology in order to enable the assessment of essential functional and non-functional system properties, including correctness, performance, stability, robustness and scalability. Adopting a model-based grey box testing approach that can exploit mixed description levels for individual (possibly 3^rd party) services promises the required flexibility for successful development workflows. In this paper, we propose such a testing approach that, considering a SOA model, defines constraint satisfaction problems for the test case generation step. First empirical results for our approach are promising.