What's new in SOA Testing?

SOA Testing.. How different is this from the Testing we have been doing all along?

SOA Testing is understood to be testing the building blocks of SOA , the services . This is evolving day by day as SOA being accepted as the mantra for business agility. There are many products in the market that help in automate testing of services. It would be fair to say that these products/tools are more or less webservice centric.

In artilce titled Adjusting Testing for SOA , David Linthicum talks about the the changes in testing approach, SOA brings to the table.

He concentrates on testing services ( Testing the Core) and makes a mention of the complexities related to service security and governance can bring to testing without elaborating on them.

In his words...

"Considering that, when testing services (for example, Web services, Java EE, etc.) you have to think about a few things, including autonomy, integration, granularity, stability and performance, in the particular order of your requirements"

Miko Matsumura in his article SOA Testing Hubub extends the concpet to SOA Governance.

He adds..

"As such, the testing group is a party concerned with the concept of quality. Therefore thier ability to create policy assertions that define their concerns and expectations around quality creates their participation in governance. Now the “enforcement point” for testing may be a quality system such as the Mindreefs, iTKO, Parasoft, PushToTest, or Solstice type system"

Mashups and EAI

In an interesting article Gregor Hohpe(Google Architect of EIP Fame) describes how EAI patterns and concepts can be used while building mashups.

This to some extent justifies, why major vendors in the EAI space (ex. TIBCO - GI Acquisition) are looking for offerings in this space.

It is not simple to differntiate Mashups from Composite Apps.Conceptually they are the same.Only difference is in their scope.Mashups are often built ad-hoc and then integrated using simple protocols like RSS and Atoms. Mashups are used in the context of Web 2.0. Mashups pull data from different sources, aggregate and transform the data to be used in different contexts.

Mashups: REST/XML,JSON, ad-hoc, bottom-up, easy to change, lowexpectations, built by user

Composite Apps: SOA/WS-*, planned, top-down, more static, (too) highexpectations, built by

If you want to know more about Mashups, have a look at this tutorial from the same author.

Heard of Yahoo Pipes.. . Experiment with it and have fun.