SOA Testing

Question

How is SOA testing different than traditional testing of application

Answer 1

As each "service-provider" should have a standard, business-oriented interface (usually provided with WSDL technology), then the following properties might be different:

• The services being provided shouldn't change from revision to revision of the modules, unless you are making extensive changes to the business itself.

• A module shouldn't care who it's clients are, which makes module-testing easier.

• Ideally, the services being consumed are provided by a directory, and not hard-coded into the modules; if this holds, then testing parts of the system -- some modules but not all -- becomes much easier as well.

Edit:

• And, as others have pointed out, you need to test conformance to the specification, and not if the present components of the system work with each other. For example, a web page might be displayed ok by Internet Explorer, but still not conform to the specification, and thus be unusable with other browsers. When you go SOA, you expect to be able to replace providers of a service seemlessly.