To learn more about Parasoft Web services solutions, go to: http://www.parasoft.com/ITmag_article.

As enterprises today increasingly depend on IT to help drive business innovation and provide competitive differentiation many are turning to web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to create the flexible and agile IT infrastructure necessary to be able to be responsive to changing business demands. The potential for Web services to deliver considerable business benefits by connecting organizations to partners and customers cannot be overlooked in today's intensely competitive marketplace. However, the flexibility provided with web services also introduces a significant degree of complexity that is consistently underestimated.

Testing the security, compliance, and reliability of web services is paramount to successful SOA implementations, particularly those that are externally facing and business critical. Enterprises need to be able to certify and approve services for business and IT standards and deployment readiness. Services need to scale for availability, reliability, integrity, reusability and overall quality. These requirements create the need for a new SOA-specific testing paradigm and test tools that can test the complex layers of a web services transaction and guide the control and quality of an enterprise's SOA.

The Challenges of Ensuring Reliability
Services impose specialized testing challenges for SOA implementations. Testing tools must be able to inject realistic usage scenarios onto the infrastructure and validate interoperability as well as transaction completeness for transactions spanning multiple services and involving multiple messaging protocols. Testing must address verification of a service's functionality as well as its performance, scalability and security. With the highly interactive and interdependent nature of SOA based applications even small changes can cause major disruptions. Reuse, service access and service availability are fundamental to achieving a robust service oriented architecture, promoting the additional need for automated regression testing as an integral element of the test process.

SOAtest: Automated Web Services Test and Analysis
To meet the testing challenges posed by SOA deployments Parasoft Corporation provides SOAtest, a comprehensive and complete testing solution for Web services. SOAtest allows users to verify all aspects of a Web service, from WSDL validation, to unit and functional testing of the client and server, to performance testing in a single integrated tool suite. From the simple testing of individual operations of a Web service thru the construction of complex test scenarios, SOAtest provides a total and holistic testing strategy for your Service Oriented Architecture and offers a wide variety of functionality and testing techniques that immediately and thoroughly exercise the security, compliance, and reliability of Web services.

Validate Complex Web Services Transactions
SOAtest automatically generates and executes test cases that begin with small, simple sets of static and dynamic unit tests that validate the functionality, interoperability, and standards compliance (e.g., WS-I, XML) of a service. These tests can then be easily combined and extended to build increasingly powerful suites with test cases being built upon each other often using data from one test as the input for another in an iterative development process. SOAtest allows you to create simulated complex scenarios and workflows reflective of a users undertaking of series of transactions with a particular Web service.

Collaborate to Achieve Repeatable Process
Because of its flexible nature, SOAtest is the ideal solution for development, QA and performance teams. SOAtest allows test cases to be re-used, combined, and extended across teams, providing seamless transfer of knowledge and test case data. Functional and unit test cases created by development and QA can be used by the performance team to generate scenarios for use in load and performance testing, thereby eliminating the need for extensive script writing and script maintenance. SOAtest saves time and improves the accuracy of test creation and execution. In addition, SOAtest automatically creates security penetration tests that protect Web services from threats such as SQL injections, XML bombs, and parameter fuzzing.

For its wide breadth of functionality, the ease of creation of both simple and highly complex test cases, its integration of performance and security testing, its support for reuse and team collaboration, and the absence of any dependency on scripting Parasoft SOAtest is the gold standard for ensuring secure, reliable and compliant Web services.

Sidequote

"SOAtest has allowed us to implement an automated and repeatable testing process with the breadth of coverage needed to ensure every release is stable, meets requirements and prevents critical errors from reaching production."
- Brandon Steele, Business Development & Systems Analyst, Sabre Holdings

Find more information on Parasoft Web services solutions at: www.parasoft.com/ITmag_article

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