Web Service Stress Testing

The term Web services refers to a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using open standards. This is a way for organizations to communicate with each other without really knowing each others' IT systems. Interaction between Web services is often difficult to test. This is so even as the development of Web services becomes more vulnerable to obscure bugs. Stress testing of Web services is one way of detecting such errors.

Methods

Stress testing methods include simple methods such as unit testing, performed by developers and geared to one specific part of a product. There are also more complex methods such as a system test, which aims to find problems with the system as a whole.

Bugs

Web service stress testing helps uncover some bugs that other sorts of testing might miss. For instance, memory leaks are very difficult for other sorts of tests to identify. This sort of testing is also good at uncovering bugs relating to synchronization and concurrency.

Tools

There are some tools, mostly those that generate simple HTML/SOAP, that help with basic Web service stress testing. HTML and SOAP are the open standards used by Web services for integrating various applications. If an organization has enough time and resources, a better way to perform Web service stress testing is to develop its own custom Web service stress testing systems.

References

• IBM: Web services programming tips and tricks: Stress testing Web services