« Software AG Laying the Foundation for its SOA Platform | Main | What is the true meaning of an ESB? »

SOA composite applications are inherently distributed. The goal is to have the different services developed by different programmers, on different platforms and languages, and reused in different business solutions. Testing distributed composite applications poses some unique challenges. Unit testing is certainly becoming more important.

I spoke with Parasoft recently. Parasoft has been in the software quality business for 18 years. Parasoft’s SOAtest provides Automated Error Prevention (AEP), which improves application quality through the automatic prevention of errors during the entire software development lifecycle. According to Parasoft, 80 percent of errors are introduced during development.

SOAtest provides a graphical interface for the chief architect to define XML-based governance rules, and policies. For companies starting on their SOA journeys, this provides developers new to SOA with development guidelines (policies set by the architect). The policy-based approach offers quality control and consistency early in the development life cycle.

SOAtest parses the service asset, which can be a BPEL process or a WSDL interface, into its operations, and then automatically performs a four-step check:
• Check for WSI interoperability
• Semantic check (both an internal link check to make sure everything is available and an external check against metadata),
• Schema check
• Pattern check using the rule wizard.

Parasoft also offers comprehensive security testing and provides early detection of any security vulnerabilities of the service. The results are fed back into the repository, which reports on quality metrics. The repository then stores a set of metadata for each service defining the quality of the service. Imagine having a quality index of services in a repository! That might encourage more reuse – or alternatively, better programming.

Posted by bethgb at 02:44 PM in Vendor Briefings | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us