Sunday, October 4, 2009

Web Services Testing


I was given a task of testing web services in my organization. Being a tester first thing came to my mind was to understand what web service is? After probing here and there I was unable to find any suitable information from testing friends & colleagues.

At last I decided to do some analysis on Google. I was able to find lot of material but all of which was related o code & I being a hardcode black box tester was not having much idea about code. I found that “Web Services can convert your application into a Web-application, which can publish its function or message to the rest of the world”. Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its interface using messages, which may be enclosed in a SOAP envelope, or follow a REST approach. These messages are typically conveyed using HTTP, and normally comprise XML in conjunction with other web-related standards.

According to the W3C a web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface that is described in a machine-acceptable format such as WSDL. Web services for testing can be done using a tool called Soap UI. Give the path for WSDL under test in the tool. The tool will show the methods & services for testing. The services will require an argument to pass.

We as a tester should get the requirements clearly from the tester. The developer is best person who can suggest you the type of argument (test data) to pass in the web services. The Soap UI (tool I used) will show you the output. The request & response are the values we are interested in noting, apart from that we need to check for the performance i.e. the loading time.

Soap UI Tool