Testing Web Services
Web Services today are often little more than software components wrapped in SOAP interfaces, and as such, today’s software testing tool vendors need only add simple XML support to their product lines to offer Web Services testing capabilities to their customers. However, over the next five years or so, Web Services herald a shift in distributed computing toward loosely coupled, standards-based, Service-oriented architectures. Testing these architectures and the Web Services that constitute them is another matter entirely. Only a few testing tool vendors have any expressed strategy for offering testing tools that work in a Service-oriented environment, and no vendors have a clear product roadmap that addresses all the Web Services testing needs that enterprises will face between now and 2006. Zapthink recommends that testing vendors evaluate their Web Services testing capabilities based not on current requirements, but upon emerging requirements for Web Services testing.