Web Service Slicing: Intra and Inter-Operational Analysis to Test Changes

We introduce Web Service Slicing, a technique that captures a functional subset of a large-scale web service using an interface slice captured as a WSDL slice (a subset of a service's WSDL). An interface (WSDL) slice provides access to an interoperable slice, which is a functional subset of the service's code. The technique uses intra-operational and inter-operational analysis to identify web service changes. With the aid of an associative code-test mapping, we leverage the identification of affected operations to reduce the cost of web-service regression testing by extracting a subset of the existing test cases. Used in conjunction with a web service slice, this subset reduces the cost of web-service regression testing by enabling the running of fewer tests. Furthermore, we exploit two approaches: Operationalized Regression Testing of Web Services (ORTWS) and Parameterized Regression Testing of Web Services (PRTWS). ORTWS effectively tests intra-operational changes at the WSDL and WS-code levels, while PRTWS tests inter-operational changes involving inter-operational dependencies due to primary parameters. Finally, we present results obtained using our prototype implementation, AWSCM (Automated Web Service Change Management), in two case-study experiments that serve to illustrate the reduction potential of the technique using eight real-world web services.