Regression Testing of Web Service: A Systematic Mapping Study

Day - Time: 01 December 2011, h.11:00
Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: C-29
Speakers
  • Bixin Li (Southeast University, Nanjing, China)
Referent

Antonia Bertolino

Abstract

Web Service is a mature and widely-used implementation technique under the new paradigm of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This work aims to identify any gap in current research and suggest some fruitful areas for further study on regression testing of Web Service. We perform a broad manual and automatic search on publication from many journals, conference/workshop proceedings in selected electronic databases published from 2000 to 2010. A total of 18 papers have been selected as primary studies for answering our research questions. Our results indicate that service integrator is the most important stakeholder of regression testing. Uncontrollability of service evolution, non-observability of service source code, high testing cost and concurrency issue are most cited difficulties in regression testing. To overcome these challenges, test case prioritization and selection are the most commonly proposed techniques where thirty-one prioritization strategies and eight selection methods have been published, respectively. Finally, it has been observed that many studies have not been theoretically proven or experimentally analyzed. Although we have found only 18 studies that address issues of regression testing in the context of Web Service, they represent a reasonable and representative sample to understand the state of research in this important area of software engineering. The results of this study provide a body of knowledge that clearly illustrates gaps in improving the quality of regression testing techniques for Web Service.