Techniques for Evaluating Service Oriented Systems : A Comparative Study

In Computer Science we have many established testing methods and tools to evaluate the software systems but unfortunately they don’t work well for systems that are made up of services. For example, to users and systems integrators, services are just interfaces. This hinders white box testing methods based on code structure and data flow knowledge. Lack of access to source code also prevents classical mutation-testing approaches, which require seeding the code with errors. Therefore, evaluation of service oriented system has been a challenge, though there are large number of evaluation metrics exist but none of them is efficient to evaluate these systems effectively. This paper discusses the different testing tools and evaluation methods available for service based applications and summarizes their limitation and support in context of service oriented architectures