WebSob: A Tool for Robustness Testing of Web Services

Abstract

Web services are a popular way of implementing a service-oriented architecture. Testing can be used to help assure both the correctness and robustness of a web service. Because manual testing is tedious, tools are needed to automate test generation and execution for web services. This paper presents WebSob, a tool for automatically generating and executing web-service requests given a service provider's Web service description language (WSDL) specification. We have applied WebSob to freely available web services and our experiences show that WebSob can be used to quickly generate and execute web-service requests that may reveal robustness problems with no knowledge of the underlying web service implementation.