Insurance sectors opt to shift to SOA applications for the benefits it offers, good news indeed. These significant benefits could be hugely advantageous when organizations identify and mitigate risks. This involves failsafe quality assurance and testing procedures around the architecture. This will minimize the number of defects that could have significant impact on the bottom line. As testing becomes more intricate with SOA, organizations must rethink their testing methods, and revise the testing roles and responsibilities.

SOA and SLA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about Architectural paradigm (pattern/model), variety of heterogeneous systems (dissimilar), different locations and owners, and web services. SOA helps reduces expensive integration, allows for more asset reuse, increases business agility and most importantly reduces business risk.

Service-level agreement (SLAs) for SOA is a formal contract between a service provider and a consumer. The contracts in this regard are, service availability, performance, traffic levels, messages / queries per hour / minute / second, response time, rejected transactions, errors and so on.

Key to SOA Performance Testing

The key to successful performance testing in general require, understanding the application and the infrastructure, understanding the user/stakeholders of the application, generating accurate anticipated volumes of traffic, and investigating the impact of the traffic on the application and systems under test. SOA Adds Complexity to Performance Testing in terms of wide range of technologies, different applications and usages, different hardware / infrastructure, knowledge of the application and the technologies, and replicating the traffic patterns.

Overcoming Challenges

To simplify performance testing for SOA applications break them down into the smallest components possible, like individual Service, systems, databases, technology, protocols, messaging, and functionality. And then evaluate and analyze the performance of individual services based on components.

Adapting the methodologies like, narrowing the testing event to the smallest element/service and understanding the transaction, application service and the environment/systems, documenting the testing approach and the expected deliverables, developing automation to replicate transactions automation, performing Test Execution, monitoring the response time for the requests sent under varying traffic levels and the impact of the traffic on the application and infrastructure under varying traffic levels, measuring and analyzing the traffic patters to with the traffic/load, one can approach the concept.

Trends like Web based  applications, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Wireless Technologies, Mobile technologies, with the increasing emphasis on repeatability, reliability, re-use and robustness, has opened a new path to testing, emphasizing more on Analysis and Design phases and ensuring early engagement of testing in these areas.

Analysis and design have been people based activities with Business Analysts and Systems Architects producing a combination of natural language, some structured language techniques, models and diagramming techniques, hence leading to business requirements and functional designs which do not meet the four key criteria which make the resultant systems ‘testable’. And to make the quality of the application clear, assumption free, unambiguous and complete, with the limited time, we will need a more structured and more automated analysis and design technique, which can be attained with robotizing the Static Testing.

In this new world, the Professional Tester will need to further concentrate on adding value to the business and the software development lifecycle and will hence need to operate in a new and elevated position where the combination of their structured process driven approach, creativity, destructive inquisitiveness and ability to articulate and define quality and testing criteria into the models will be critical to the success of the business implementation of technology. 

The role of the Professional Tester will now become more interesting and more essential. And so will Testing and Quality Assurance, which will become more important and add more value as we move into architectures and technologies which support the business in their goals of bringing products and services to the market as rapidly as possible, with minimal risk. We will see a shift towards testing the transformed business operation, the business processes, the way people interact with the systems and processes and the information it provides, and therefore mitigating the risks and increasing the benefits of business change.