Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

With recent investments in service-oriented computing by major technological players including Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo, the drive towards service-oriented computing is evident. While these novel systems remain closely tied to traditional information technology systems and modern web-based applications, they pose a number of unique challenges for which innovative software engineering methodologies are required. Unique testing challenges within service-oriented computing systems include the verification of the web-service endpoints and the verification of the state of the system across multiple heterogeneous nodes. Testing the non-functional quality attributes of traditional software systems is a challenging endeavour, and the same holds true for service-oriented computing. Although infrastructure for security between services is established, development strategies, tools and testing techniques that decrease the number of defects within web-services are required to produce secure service-oriented computing systems. The objective of this research endeavour is produce a low-cost automated testing solution for use in service-oriented computing. This goal is to be realized through: (i) the creation of an automated extraction mechanism for a context-free grammatical input definition from a WSDL specification; (ii) the development of an automated reverse-engineering input-constraints solver based on the runtime traces of a web-service and HTTP server logs; (iii) the development of automated defect detection to aid the overall testing solution; and (iv) the development of an invariant-validation framework for existing Enterprise Service Bus infrastructure. The outcome of the research is expected to have significant implications for the development of robust web-services and the next generation of service-oriented computing infrastructure, as well as for the broader web engineering and software testing fields.