Generating web service tests during behavior-driven development

A web service is a software solution for machine-to-machine communication over a network. Web services provide a very crucial role since a lot of applications work over the Web and interoperate with each other. Thus, web services are commonly used in exchanging data over the internet. Web services exchange data in a well formed format over the web. This format is generally XML (Extensible Markup Language) or sometimes JSON. Both XML and JSON documents contain structured data in a way which is both human-readable and machine-readable. The protocol used in exchanging data is HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). HTTP is the underlying World Wide Web protocol, which specifies the format and the transmission of the messages and defines the responsive actions of web servers and browsers. Trust is a big consideration during the design of a web service. As all software, a web service should work correctly every time it is executed. Tests and certification are the only ways to achieve such trust. It is best to apply different approaches to test a web service other than just from the client side execution. To fully test a web service, the following functionalities should be tested: Basic web service functionality, web service interoperability, SOA functionalities, quality of service and load/stress testing. Conformance and performance testing of web services may be achieved by the use of testing tools. Today, JMeter is one of the most accepted testing tools in software industry. By the use of this tool, test plans are created to run a variety of tests on software. The approach used in this work to test a web service is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a software development process, in which the requirements and the expected behavior of the system are specified in a human readable, ubiquitous language to be able to perform acceptance tests. This language is defined as a common language between developers and domain experts to understand business specifications. In BDD, the expected behavior of the system is defined before the actual development and unit testing stages. The most known example to such a language is Gherkin. Gherkin is a business readable, domain specific language created specifically for behavior descriptions. In this work, a new tool is presented to ease the creation of web service test scenarios and test software. The suggested tool uses the Behavior-Driven Development concept with the Gherkin language to generate JMeter test scripts dynamically. By doing this, several benefits are achieved. First benefit is; any domain expert without software knowledge can create and run web service tests, since Gherkin is a domain specific language. Second, unit tests are not written manually by developers, since the use of powerful testing tool JMeter. In addition, the time required to create and run the tests are greatly reduced for repetitive tests. It is believed that similar BDD testing approaches will become more popular in the near future.