What would it mean to have a SOA test product? Software vendor Parasoft is fielding a SOA tester known as Parasoft SOAtest 5.5, and on the main, it is SOA-ready because it holds a certain awareness of XML-related components.

What is a SOA test product? On one level, Service-Oriented Architecture means no more than to ‘do the right thing.’ That is: To correctly create, size and describe your software components, make sure they don’t bump into one another, and make sure the messages they deal with are in turn created and sized correctly, and that they end up where they are supposed to be going in adequate time.

Software vendor Parasoft is fielding a SOA tester known as Parasoft SOAtest 5.5, and on the main, it is SOA-ready because it holds a certain awareness of XML-related componentry. Parasoft SOAtest 5.5 runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The most recent release is said to offer test capabilities for multi-protocol environments, which, by some theories, would be the definition of ‘SOA.’ The most recent release lets .NET developers exercise messages in protocols that include the .NET proprietary standards.

That means specialized support for Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is Microsoft’s recipe for Web services, distributed systems and Web services interoperability. The suite can integrate with Visual Studio Team System for Software Testers.

Parasoft SOAtest 5.5 is SOA-ready because it can generate intelligent stubs that emulate behavior of running systems, according to Parasoft. The software is ‘SOA aware’ and ‘WCF aware.’

Parasoft’s Wayne Ariola, VP for Strategy, told us the early SOA initiatives were very much about Java.

“A team responsible for setting the baseline for SOA was typically doing that in Java, Ariola said. “Now that foundational piece is done and other departments are trying to leverage the SOA infrastructure.”

In some organizations, more department involvement means more .NET involvement. WCF, which appeared last year under the aegis .NET 3.0, is a logical next step for many organizations, said Ariola.

“From a testing point of view, we could handle [WCF] before, but we have a more consolidated  view now,” he said.

Besides integrating with Visual Studio Team System, Parasoft SOAtester 5.5 also integrates with folks on the other end of the spectrum. It offers integration with the BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository and WebLogic JMX performance monitor, as well as IBM’s Rational TestManager and WebSphere JMX performance monitor.

There is always something new under the sun or there is never anything new under the sun - take your pick. But the case can be made that SOA test is unique.

There’s quite a bit more to SOA testing and quality than simply testing the Service implementations, Ron Schmelzer, managing partner for SOA thought leader ZAPThink says. “In fact,” he say, “that’s where the similarities end.”

“SOA,” according to Schmelzer, “involves the composition of loosely coupled, heterogeneous Services in an environment of continuous change.”

Schmelzer said via e-mail: “That means that there are lots of things that can change… and lots that can go wrong, even if the Service implementations stay the same. Good SOA quality tools don’t just do unit-testing on Services (basically using Web Services as a standards-based API), but also test whether the metadata itself works, tests Service compositions, underlying schema, policy metadata, and any other compositional or metadata logic used to make the architecture work.”

In addition, he said, good SOA quality testing tools do that in a continuous, iterative fashion.

What is your idea of SOA and SOA test? Let us know. - Jack Vaughan

Related
SOAtest 5.5 - Parasoft

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Interoperability, XML/Web services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.