Implication/Challenges in WS-Testing

• The biggest challenge is people confuse WS-Testing with SOA-Testing. There may be 50% to 60% overlap, but they are different. WS-Testing is just a subset of SOA testing. Check following links:
  
• http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3588361
• http://itko.blogspot.com/2007/03/big-ws-difference.html
• QA teams are not used to testing non-UI type interfaces
• Manual testing doesn't work anymore. QA must improve its skillset to survive in SOA world
• SOA testing requires QA teams to have fairly good understanding of the underlying architecture
  
• It requires QA teams to really understand the basics of different SOA technologies, some of which are: Web Services, EJB, JMS/ESB, REST, RMI, POJO, relational and hierarchical DB, .NET, etc.
• QA teams are NOT used to managing test assets. They must follow engineering best practices.
• Use of version control systems
• Collaboration sites like wikis
  
• SOA enables Agile development which requires QA to work more upstream with development
• All of the basic test automation challenges still applies
• Test management, test data management
  
• Version control, sharing, nightly test runs
  
• Automated reporting, result analysis, debugging
  
• High reusability, lower maintenance, test mobility
• Once teams understand the difference between traditional QA and SOA-Testing, the next challenge that they have in front of them is Test Data Management. Understanding all the data requirement and figuring out how this data will be fed into the test cases is the key.
  
• http://almquality.blogspot.com/2006/08/data-driven-testing-ddt.html
• http://almquality.blogspot.com/2006/08/data-strategy-ds.html
• Lastly, the teams MUST follow establish some best practices.
  
• Test Bed Setup - including server farms
  
• Test Directory structure - project workspace
  
• Naming conventions
  
• Data Management,Test Libraries
  
• Configurations,
  
• Versioning
• Reporting