Service level agreements (SLAs) are typically used to specify rules regarding the consumption of services that are agreed between the providers of the service-based applications (SBAs) and their consumers. An SLA includes a list of terms that contain the guarantees that must be fulfilled during the provisioning and consumption of the services. Since the violation of such guarantees may lead to the application of potential penalties, it is important to assure that the SBA behaves as expected. In this paper, we propose a proactive approach to test SLA-aware SBAs by means of identifying test requirements, which represent situations that are relevant to be tested. To address this issue, we define a four-valued logic that allows evaluating both the individual guarantee terms and their logical relationships. Grounded in this logic, we devise a test criterion based on the modified condition decision coverage (MCDC) in order to obtain a cost-effective set of test requirements from the structure of the SLA. Furthermore by analyzing the syntax and semantics of the agreement, we define specific rules to avoid non-feasible test requirements. The whole approach has been automated and applied over an eHealth case study.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used to specify the negotiated conditions between the provider and the consumer of services. In this paper we present a stepwise method to identify and categorize a set of test requirements that represent the potential situations that can be exercised regarding the specification of each isolated guarantee term of an SLA. This identification is addressed by means of devising a set of coverage levels that allow grading the thoroughness of the tests. The utilization of these test requirements would focus on twofold objectives: (1) the generation of a test suite that allows exercising the situations described in the test requirements and (2) the support for the derivation of a monitoring plan that checks the compliance of these requirements at runtime. The approach is illustrated over an eHealth case study.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a promising solution to develop interoperable and highly dynamic applications. In the domain of SOA, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used to specify the stipulated terms between the service provider and the consumer. Due to the unique features of this paradigm such as SLA management, testing SOA presents new challenges to researchers because traditional testing techniques need to be suitably adapted. It is important for both stakeholders to develop proactive approaches that allow the detection of problems before they may later derive in SLA violations. This paper tackles the problem of testing the terms of the SLA, specified in WS-Agreement language, by introducing a stepwise method based on a well-known partition testing technique. The approach is illustrated over a case study.

The XML language is becoming the preferred means of data interchange and representation in web based applications. Usually, XML data is stored in XML repositories, which can be accessed efficiently using the standard XPath as query language. However, the specific techniques for testing these queries often ignore the functional testing. This work addresses this problem by introducing a technique based on the category-partition method for the systematic design of test input data for an XPath query. The method permits the automatic identification of categories and choices in the XPath and XML Schema implementations and the construction of constraints in order to obtain complete and valid test cases. The technique is illustrated over a practical example.