SUMMARY Service‐oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining momentum as an emerging distributed system architecture for business‐to‐business collaborations. This momentum can be observed in both industry and academic research. SOA presents new challenges and opportunities for testing and verification, leading to an upsurge in research. This paper surveys the previous work undertaken on testing and verification of service‐centric systems, which in total are 177 papers, showing the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies and testing tools and identifying issues for future work. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Search-Based Test Data Generation reformulates testing goals as fitness functions so that test input generation can be automated by some chosen search-based optimization algorithm. The optimization algorithm searches the space of potential inputs, seeking those that are “fit for purpose,” guided by the fitness function. The search space of potential inputs can be very large, even for very small systems under test. Its size is, of course, a key determining factor affecting the performance of any search-based approach. However, despite the large volume of work on Search-Based Software Testing, the literature contains little that concerns the performance impact of search space reduction. This paper proposes a static dependence analysis derived from program slicing that can be used to support search space reduction. The paper presents both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the application of this approach to open source and industrial production code. The results provide evidence to support the claim that input domain reduction has a significant effect on the performance of local, global, and hybrid search, while a purely random search is unaffected.

We present an algorithm for constructing fitness functions that improve the efficiency of search-based testing when trying to generate branch adequate test data. The algorithm combines symbolic information with dynamic analysis and has two key advantages: It does not require any change in the underlying test data generation technique and it avoids many problems traditionally associated with symbolic execution, in particular the presence of loops. We have evaluated the algorithm on industrial closed source and open source systems using both local and global search-based testing techniques, demonstrating that both are statistically significantly more efficient using our approach. The test for significance was done using a one-sided, paired Wilcoxon signed rank test. On average, the local search requires 23.41% and the global search 7.78% fewer fitness evaluations when using a symbolic execution based fitness function generated by the algorithm.

There has recently been a great deal of interest in search-based test data generation, with many local and global search algorithms being proposed. However, to date, there has been no investigation ofthe relationship between the size of the input domain (the search space) and performance of search-based algorithms. Static analysis can be used to remove irrelevant variables for a given test data generation problem, thereby reducing the search space size. This paper studies the effect of this domain reduction, presenting results from the application of local and global search algorithms to real world examples. This provides evidence to support the claimthat domain reduction has implications for practical search-based test data generation.

In object-oriented programming (OOP), proxies are entities that act as an intermediary between client objects and target objects. Dynamic proxies can be used to construct distributed systems that support the open implementation approach and promote code reuse. The OO paradigm supports code reuse through various ways including inheritance, polymorphism and aggregation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of software reuse restricted to reuse of code components and address the question of constructing distributed systems based on dynamic proxies. Different networking techniques and programming paradigms such as Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI), the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java Servlets are used to implement the distributed client/server architecture. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.