Web Services Testing: An Overview

Web Services is a method by which two different applications exchange their data regardless of the underlying architecture or technology.

Web services are a means of interoperability between software applications that are running across different platforms and frameworks.

A Web service communicates between electronic devises via the World Wide Web.

Why a web service needed in the first place? In this age of technology you don’t necessarily have to build an application from scratch.

Readymade services are available in abundant, which can be integrated within your application according to your needs.

A web service lets you do these kind of implementations. It is also factual that a failed web service creates chaos not only to the managers but also to the administrators who are responsible for the server maintenance.

A failure also discomforts the clients who are trying to call the particular web service.

The vital features of web services are messaging, repository and service. The important thing to keep in mind while testing web services is to include interfaces into testing requirements, since the web services are generally distributed over networks.

Web services are generally vulnerable to added risks in the areas of integration and interoperability.

The benefit of a web service is that it can be executed using any programming language and on any platform, depending on one condition, WSDL should be available. WSDL is a standard XML based interface definition language.

Web services can be executed in many ways. SOAP and REST are couple of popular approaches.

Representational state transfer is an architectural style that runs over HTTP. It displays the communication between clients and services.

SOAP on the other hand is a standard messaging protocol for exchanging structured information.

Web Services Testing

Web services provides uninterrupted connection between two software applications over private intranets and the Internet.

In Web services’ testing the functionality and load aspects of a Web service is tested. By performing web services testing helps organizations detect errors within a system at an earlier stage. 

Test automation services is preferred in such cases, as it helps to perform tests repeatedly and efficiently, thus improving the time to market of the application. 

In particular, test automation will be helpful in the Web services development process, as it helps in the assessment of the functionality, security, performance, scalability, and UI of Web services.

Web Services Testing Tools

There are many web services testing tools available in the market. Here are a few that are most popular in the market

• TestMaker
• ManageEngine
• SoapUI
• QEngine
• WebInject toolsets

These tools are open source thus reducing the overall costs drastically. They also help to increase test automation efficiency consequently decreasing the coding effort.

In today’s competitive world, a faster test cycle time at an affordable cost is vital to stay competitive. A reusable test automation framework coupled with open source tools will deliver you the same.