Colleen Frye recently wrote about the consequences of overlooking SOA testing blind spots at SearchSoftwareQuality.com. She reported on an interview with ITKO’s John Michelsen, and Crosscheck's Rizwan Mallal, Green Hat's Madeline Bayliss, and Scott Barber, chief technologist of testing services at PerfTestPlus.
John said that unintended consequences result from failing to test the dependencies in SOA applications. The solution is not to retest all the services that have already been individually tested, but to conduct a test of the business process in context. Then you have to do continuous validation at all phases to guard against the effects of changes to a service.
Another potential blond spot mentioned in the article is the reliance on HTTP return codes to determine the success of an operation. You need to perform deeper content inspection. Another blind spot can occur when testers ramp up load by simply sending duplicate WS-Security-enabled message. Scott said that testers need to be careful to test all kinds of potential malformed data input and this is often overlooked. He added that testers need to look more carefully when third party services are in use.
John concluded that while quality still belongs in QA, the development team and the IT governance group also have responsibility. It was a rich conversation and there is more at Colleen’s post.
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