PhD7: Mechanisms for Test Awareness and Isolation in Enterprise Services
Title: Mechanisms for Test Awareness and Isolation in Enterprise Services
Advisors:
Abstract:
Enterprise services supported by SOAP web services or Enterprise JavaBeans are increasingly being used in business and safety-critical applications to provide business functions to clients. Testing these systems can be quite difficult, since at runtime they are supported by a complex infrastructure that usually does not provide a testing facility for developers. Thus, currently there are no standard mechanisms that provide test isolation (separation between testing and nominal operations) and test awareness (the mechanisms that allow the service to know that is being tested) to enterprise services.
The goal of this work is to create mechanisms that can be used, in a standard way, by enterprise services to support test isolation and awareness. In practice, key objectives this thesis include:
- The definition of framework that can be used by developers to deploy services, while guaranteeing test isolation and awareness.
- The experimental demonstration of the isolation and awareness mechanisms under realistic scenarios.
- Several research papers, to be submitted to top international conferences and Journals, describing the new mechanisms necessary to test web services while guaranteeing test isolation and awareness.
The main idea is to allow runtime testing to occur simultaneously with the execution of the nominal operations. Considering the test awareness, the system must identify the test requests and take the proper measures to minimize the impact on the system (e.g., execute requests with low priority). Isolation in pure transactional services can be achieved by automatically doing a rollback after a test has concluded. More complex cases might require the design of specific recovery actions.
In terms of evaluation, the mechanisms should not impact the normal service provided by the operational environment. The correct results of the systems functionalities should be verified as well as the performance degradation resulting of the concomitant test process. Also, the mechanism should be able to register partial and final results during the test allowing further analysis.
Bibliography:
- Gonzalez, A.; Piel, E.; Gross, H.-G., "A Model for the Measurement of the Runtime Testability of Component-Based Systems," Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops, 2009. ICSTW '09, pp.19,28, 1-4 April 2009.
- Lahami, M.; Krichen, M., "Test Isolation Policy for Safe Runtime Validation of Evolvable Software Systems," Enabling Technologies: IEEE 22nd Int. Workshop on Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE), 2013, pp.377,382, 17-20 June 2013.
- Greiler, M.; Gross, H.-G.; Nasr, K.A., "Runtime Integration and Testing for Highly Dynamic Service Oriented ICT Solutions -- An Industry Challenges Report," Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference - Practice and Research Techniques, 2009. TAIC PART '09. , pp.51,55, 4-6 Sept. 2009.
- Zhu, H.; Zhang Y. “Collaborative Testing of Web Services”. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Issue 1, Vol. 5, pp. 116-130, Jan-Mar 2012.
- Suliman, D.; Paech, B.; Borner, L.; Atkinson, C.; Brenner, D.; Merdes, M.; Malaka, R., "The MORABIT Approach to Runtime Component Testing," 30th Annual Int Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2006. COMPSAC '06. , vol.2, no., pp.171,176, 17-21 Sept. 2006.
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