SOA Testing - It's gaining traction

STARWEST 2007 is the premier conference for QA/Testing professionals. With over 1000 attendees focused on learning the latest testing techniques, the conference serves as a benchmark for what is relevant to the testing community.

This year, we are thrilled to see the testing community starting to focus on and learn about the nuances of modern web services-based SOA Testing. The increasing number of SOA Testing related offering at STARWEST 2007 serves as a good bechmark for the increase in relevance and activity in this area. The following talks and courses are presented this year realted to SOA Testing:

The Coming SOA Revolution: What It Means To Testers -- Frank Cohen, PushToTest

Testing SOA Applications: What’s New, What’s Not -- Brian Bryson, IBM

Ensuring Quality in Web Services -- Chris Hetzler, Appolis Software

The Art and Science of SOA Testing -- Mamoon Yunus & Rizwan Mallal, Crosscheck Networks

This is the second event where we are presenting a day long course on SOA Testing. STAREAST 2007, hosted in Orlando, FL was the first day long course offered exclusively on SOA Testing in the industry. We are on v2 of this course with more structured Labs. I hope the attendees like it more than the v1 offering at STAREAST 2007 - although an 8.9 average from 28 attendees will be tough to beat.

SOA Testing Goes Academic

I came across a recent publication titled Testing in a SOA World presented at The Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technologies (InfoTech-2007), September 21-23, 2007, Bulgaria.

Here's the Abstract:

"Abstract: Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the latest attempt to better link the
business with technology. Testing a SOA applications become more and more complex,
as it should be continuous, not just in development and integration, but in deployment,
because an SOA by nature is never a static application. Even if each service in a SOA
application is tested thoroughly and carefully the quality of the final application may
suffer because testing is not enough after the integration of the services. This article
presents the challenges and problems that test teams experience when testing SOA
applications. It also summarizes how the testing of SOA is carried out now and gives
some ideas on further improvements."

The article provides a comprehensive overview of challenges facing the SOA Testing world. I am pleased to see the academic community getting involved in this area and hope that will innovate and produce exceptional original work in solving issues in SOA Testing. For the complete article, please see:

http://www.crosschecknet.com/soa_testing/TestingInAServiceOrientedWorld.pdf

SOA Testing Market Report -- the451group

Dennis Callaghan, analyst with The 451 Group, has written a comprehensive report on the state of the SOA Testing market. You have to be a member to access the report, however, here is a snippet from Dennis' piece:

"As enterprises increasingly deploy architectures where applications share and exchange data and information as services, demand will grow for tools that test these complex service interactions – a demand that traditional developer testing tools can't really meet. And so the SOA testing tools space was born and is currently populated by existing testing vendors that have developed new products to meet the particular needs of this architecture, as well as more nimble startups looking for ways to differentiate their offerings. Many of these startups, as they grow and prove the market for their software, should become attractive acquisition targets. This remains a nascent space and there has yet to be an acquisition of an SOA-specific testing company."

To read the full report, please visit www.the451group.com for a trial membership or click here - http://www.the451.com/apply/apply.php.