The importance of validating SOA

August 24, 2006

Overall, reusing services and components to build new applications, coupled with the ability to utilize open standards such as SOAP, XML, etc. make Service Oriented Architecture a dependable and valuable business strategy in today's IT environment.

However, the benefits of SOA will only be realized by organizations that achieve maximum test coverage along with assurance of dependability and functionality for the number of services and processes that are happening 'behind the scenes' of their SOA.

With so many moving parts within SOAs, there's really only one way companies can ensure all important parts are working efficiently.

Traditional testing tools which look at some, but not all aspects of an application are not the answer. SOA's missing link is end-to-end testing of all services, components and messages along a business process path.

In a SOA, systems and applications are built to depend on one another to complete a business process or service--regardless of their underlying implementation or platform. As such, SOA's numerous points of exchange between and across these systems create numerous opportunities for defects. To find and correct these, SOA and integration testing must address five things.

* Defect detection: Defects in a SOA are extremely difficult to detect, isolate, and fix for many reasons, including the variety of transport protocols that are inaccessible to testers and system administrators. As a result, these defects usually remain unseen until the full system can be tested at a project's tail end. Problems discovered later in the development cycle have often multiplied throughout the system, and are among the most costly to fix.

* Error permutations: XML messages transmitted between the various systems in a SOA often encapsulate substance (data) and a function (remote procedure call). Although these messages are communicated via standardized SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) envelopes, they contain many customized formats and fields. An error can occur anywhere in the fields that contain both logic and message data. This can create an enormous set of permutations and error points, making it extremely difficult to field an effective testing solution around the service.

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* Explicit programming: Web services and SOA demand rigorously defined inputs and outputs that behave predictably. For example, in Microsoft Excel, each cell (or message) must be formatted to accept the proper data. Cells for monetary figures must accept dollar signs, cells for decimals must accept decimal points, etc. Unless this is explicitly expressed for services in a SOA, communication errors can abound.

* Process confirmation: When businesses build a SOA or embark on an integration initiative, they are pulling, modifying, and pushing data between dozens of systems. Most systems provide a confirmation message that a process, such as an update, has occurred--and that's it. There's no guarantee that the data pulled from system X, modified or otherwise acted upon by system Y, and passed to system Z was accurate in the first place, modified correctly, or stored in the right place. There are myriad opportunities for catastrophic errors in logic and function.

* Evolving standards: As SOA grows in popularity and best practice deployments multiply, implementation standards will become more prevalent. For example, standards for SOA validation, addressing, and governance are not readily available, but these efforts are in practice in a variety of companies today. Because the definition of SOA is still changing, it is extremely difficult to provide high-quality services without adopting a test-driven, end-to-end approach.

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Traditional testing's front-end, application-centric approach is ineffective for integration and SOA testing. So is manual testing. It's not that they don't provide value to integration and SOA projects in certain circumstances, rather that they are just the wrong tools for the job. End-to-end testing is required in order to peer deep inside the SOA, find defects, and correct them before they corrupt or interrupt critical business activities. End-to-end SOA testing delivers four critical capabilities to accomplish this.

Topping the list: Test coverage. SOA and integration environments are built with many components: multiple programming languages, XML dialects, enterprise service busses, legacy assets, databases, and files with various operating systems and transport protocols moving messages and orchestrating services.

What's needed is a testing tool that can address these disparate components and layers of complexity, because they contain tremendous amounts of functional logic that fall outside the domain of traditional application testing. Failing to provide proper test coverage of deeply-embedded logic can cripple a composite application built using these components. A traditional application testing tool won't find these defects--ever. Testing tools developed specifically for SOA and integration environments will.

Next up: Test automation. The assembly-based approach of integration and SOA projects favors the use of automated tools to provide automated test-driven development techniques. That means developers can automatically test early and often at each stage of the architecture development or with every sprint release.

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In this way, the architecture or composite application cost-effectively evolves with quality baked in, as opposed to being built and later thrown over the wall to a QA team (which is the most common and costly way to test). The only way to properly test an integration and SOA environment is with an automated testing tool suite that supports agile practices and traditional testing tools.

Then there's process visibility. End-to-end integration and SOA testing helps QA teams, architects, and developers assure that messages, services, as well as the business processes they support are inspected and working properly.

Quality staff can look at actual messages moving from system to system, across numerous transport protocols, and correlate these messages to larger services and business processes (such as a bank deposits or look-up of customer data), to be certain the larger process executes and commits as specified. In this way, SOA testing makes it easy to design test scenarios for complex business processes.

Lastly, there's reuse. As SOA environments grow ever larger and test case volume expands, communications between development, architecture, operations, and QA personnel can skew. To administer large-scale integration efforts and validate quality, businesses need a tool that lets these individuals and teams share and reuse test cases.

SOA testing tools do this by storing test cases and libraries of test suites, allowing different application development personnel immediate access to shared resources. For example, when a QA team member finds an error, they can quickly reference the exact test case, and identify if the defect requires a developer of architect to address the issue.

End-to-end testing streamlines the error discovery, diagnosis, and validation for integration and SOA environments in several quantifiable ways.

Increased test coverage means end-to-end testing can quickly identify problems, isolate root causes, and generate reports and metrics related to SOA quality.

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Iteratively finding and fixing defects saves time and money. It dramatically reduces the cost of fixing problems in production, which experienced programmers and QA professionals know can be as high as 10 times the original cost of production.

Finally, automated end-to-end testing allows rigorous and tedious QA work to happen at the click of a mouse, managed by just one person. Automated testing will allow the redeployment of staff and increase project turnaround time, which will improve release frequency and quality, and speed time to market.

SOA is a world of 'behind the scenes' complexities, where system defects are among the most elusive to find, and most expensive to correct. One defect can start a domino effect that degrades quality across many business processes and supporting or dependent systems.

Agile, automated end-to-end integration and SOA testing is the missing link, because it validates business processes by programmatically inspecting each component, service, and message across a variety of protocols as SOAs are developed, deployed, and maintained.

With end-to-end testing, businesses can reap the maximum ROI and business process alignment promised by a SOA.

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