Web services allow machines and users to interact and transfer data over a network in an interoperable way. Application programming interfaces provide guidelines for accessing different web services' data. Testing web services is important to ensure businesses can connect machines across platforms and locations, prevent economic losses from failures, and maintain service level agreements when services are updated. The document then outlines methods for automating web service testing including converting test cases to XML, fault seeding, replaying on faulted services, and analyzing test coverage and efficiency.

1. ● Web services enable clients i.e. users/machines to interact with servers i.e
machines and transfer data over a network.
● Interoperable: Web services allow machines in different platforms to
interact with each other (Fig 1).
● APIs (Application Programming Interface) act as a guideline of how to
access data of different web services.
Terminologies:
XML/JSON - A markup language used to encode data.
Provides standardization. JSON is similar to XML but less
bulky.
SOAP- A type of web service where data is transferred using
XML enveloped in a SOAP request.
RESTful - A type of web service that uses a URI (Uniform
Resource Locator) to send requests and uses both XML and
JSON to get the responses.
Why Web Service Testing?
● Allows businesses to connect all their machines despite
different platform and geographical location.
● A failure in web service operation might result in huge
economic loss for businesses.
● Regression testing ensures that updating web service
does not cause break it and/or reduce its efficacy
(maintain SLA).
● A user session starts when a unique user starts interacting with a web service and
ends when the user quits
● Authentication Key
● Convert test cases into XML based test cases.
● Fault seeding in our web service → Purposefully
adding faulty cases to see if our test cases can catch
the errors.
● Replay test cases on a fault seeded web service.
● Analyze the efficiency of our test cases:
○ How many faults they are able to identify?
○ Code coverage and function coverage?
○ Time taken to return data?
● Compare with other testing methods and do a relative
comparison.
● Our future work will analyze the reports of our web
service test cases to find patterns in test cases that
fail to identify faults.
● Make better test cases.
● Made our own web application by implementing web services
using Django Framework which uses Python:
https://servo.cs.wlu.edu/animals/
● Used PetFinder API, Twitter API, Reddit API and Cat API(to get cat
pictures!)
● Made our own web service so that people can access our
database, using our API. Used Django-Rest Framework.
● API documentation → Instruction manual
● Used SOAP UI to make test cases. Tested our web application.
● Test Cases included property transfer, Groovy script, assertions,
JSON hierarchy test etc.
● Deployed our API so that anyone and everyone can use it!
INTRODUCTION
This research is supported by Summer Research Scholars and Dr. Sara Sprenkle
METHODS SUMMER WORK
FUTURE WORK
Figure 1: This diagram shows how different clients access data on a database using a web service.
Source: http://sharepoint-works.blogspot.com/2012/12/basics-of-web-services.html.
Automated Web Service Testing
Azmain Amin, Mina Shnoudah
Dr. Sara Sprenkle
Department of Computer Science
Washington and Lee University
Fig 2: How a web service works.
Fig 3: Research methodology.
Fig 4: RockBridge Pets web application.
Fig 5: Using Soap UI to test our web application.
Fig 6: The top shows an
example of a successful test
case, and the bottom shows an
example of a failed test case.