• Data Driven Testing (No GUI)
• Difficulty in isolating the bugs due to presence of multiple layers
• Difficult to test Secure Web Services; especially those requiring encrypted and signed test data
• Lack of effective reporting and debugging capabilities in available tools, that is essential for Web Services
• Increased number of integration and interoperability because of multiple service involvement and communication among them
• Involvement of 3rd party services in end-to-end solution
• Different services may have different authorization / authentication approach
• Performance testing problems due to:
  • Small service large overhead
  • Service need specific hardware specification
  • Distributed service may have network latency

There are four major aspects of comprehensively testing a Web Service:

• Functionality
• Security
• Performance
• Conformance
  

Web Service Testing Approach
Functionality testing includes testing of WSDL, Publication of the WSDL to the UDDI, Positive and negative tests, testing of SOAP the messages, testing of the transport medium like HTTP, JMS SMTP etc. the end-to-end business flow testing including 3rd party services, testing from both the service provider and service consumer point of view.

Testing non-functional requirements in an SOA deployment are a challenge and Wipro’s focus for non-functional testing is as follows:

• Test security of the service by violating security polices
• Test interoperability by testing service on various platforms
• Test various business transaction for it’s consistency
• Performance testing and optimization