FWF - Audit 4 SOAs - Augmented Diagnosis and Testing for SOAs - Audit 4 SOAs

  • Pill, Ingo Hans (Co-Investigator (CoI))
  • Wotawa, Franz (Principal Investigator (PI))

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

The principles of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been receiving high attention lately, and are nowadays widely established in the software industry for the application in many domains. The fast evolution of available technology entails the development of new complex domains, and in turn enables and drives active research in fields such as self-optimizing distributed systems, autonomic computing, adaptive systems, or cloud computing. Nowadays SOA-based systems consist of a multitude of Web services, registries/brokers, mediators, message buses, monitors, governance systems and many more components. This ever-growing complexity leads however to a rather high error-proneness, due to the large amount of components and complex as well as subtle links and dependencies between individual system parts. Today there exist numerous solutions that assist designers in testing single Web services. We are however faced with a lack of options that enable methodical system-wide runtime tests of complex SOA systems. We argue that a system-wide high-quality assessment in real conditions is an essential factor in the process of facing today's complexity of SOAs and assure the quality of related prototypes and production systems while keeping development time within manageable bounds. With this project, we face the challenge to provide a methodology and related technologies for a high-quality development environment for SOAs. Specifically we will facilitate the development of SOA models that enable an automated construction of realistic testbeds and high-quality test-suites for system-wide runtime tests. These runtime tests will enable the assessment of important system traits like performance, stability, robustness, scalability, and other functional and non-functional properties in real world scenarios and conditions. Furthermore, we will integrate diagnostic reasoning in the model itself and the testing process. Developed models will thus also contain diagnostic reasoning aspects, so that for failing tests we will provide engineers and researchers with the means to isolate faults using model-based diagnosis techniques. The integration of ideas from the testing as well as model-based diagnosis communities in an active diagnosis'' step will enable us to derive additional tests for the discrimination between ambiguous diagnoses, an essential factor in our proposed work-flow. The diagnostic aspects of the model will also act as additional and interesting criteria for the test-suite generation process. With our focus on providing a methodology and related technologies for a high-quality assessment of SOA traits under realistic conditions, we address current needs of researchers and engineers in this area. We will enable them to assure the quality of their prototypes and products by finding errors with high quality system-wide runtime tests and the option to isolate corresponding faults using diagnostic reasoning. The models will also allow very early design assessment. In the course of the extensive research necessary to achieve our aims, we will integrate the know-how from multiple communities (SOA, testing, model-based diagnosis). As a consequence, in our vision, we expect to give these communities new impulses by the know-how transfer resulting from this project, which, besides our achievements, will sparkle additional research by other groups.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/05/1130/04/14

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