Web Services is emerging as the premier integration and technology framework in today’s complex and heterogeneous computing environment. With technology, distributed development and testing, and process models posing as the main challenges to testing of such technology frameworks, and even more, for applications built using web services, the demands on the testing team have become more challenging.

The testing being done needs to validate the applications from a browser-end perspective, and also validate the platform architecture built using Web Services so that defects are prevented from being detected late in the cycle during application or end-to-end (e2e) testing. Traditional software testing that focused on code-level testing has evolved with distributed and web service architectures. Web application testing has introduced greater testing of business logic through the application’s user interface, which has proved to be critical when deploying new solutions. With web services, the need to test the business logic still exists; however, many web services will not have a user interface, which is one of the new challenges to the test organization.

Web Services are based on heterogeneous technologies. No longer can we expect to test an application that was developed by a unified group, as a single project, sitting on a single application server and delivering through a standardized browser interface. The ability to string together multiple types of components to form a business process requires unconstrained thinking from an architect’s perspective, and test planning and scheduling complexities from a tester’s perspective. To test web services, we need to go far beyond merely testing a user interface or browser screen. The governing and designing principles of web services, coupled with the benefits that web services claims to deliver, will force changes to organizations’ approaches to Software Testing and Quality Assurance.

This conference will address the above challenges, as we review and enhance the current test methodology along side tools to help organizations to plan, manage and automate web services functional, performance and security testing.