How do you know how well tested your Web Services are?

When a Web Service project grows, testing it can be a complex task and getting metrics of how well tested the Web Services are, is very difficult. When the scope of the Web Services grow, finding untested parts of the Services is downright impossible and the risk increases exponentially. This risk is something you previously had to live with and probably the consequences as well.

WSDL Coverage

This is where soapUI Pro comes to the rescue. For the first time ever you can see how well tested the services are and where you can improve the tests.

It is deceptively easy;

Open the Project Inspector, choose the Project Coverage tab, run your tests and, voila! You have a useful metric.

Once you have a coverage percentage, you can see if the stated goals for well testedness are met and where you can improve your tests.

By seeing which elements are covered by tests you can see where improvements can be done and quickly improve test quality.

SOAP Monitor Coverage

So the question is; do I have to write my tests in soapUI to generate Coverage? The answer is; You should, soapUI is the most effective environment available to genereate high quality Web Service Tests. But if you are doing a lot of tests manually, if you use Unit tests or if you have an another tool, you still can generate coverage.

You can use soapUI's Monitor Coverage functionality. Set it up to listen to a certain port, re-rout all messages through the Monitor and get a coverage report.

This will create an additional value from your Manual Test or Unit tests and actually give a very clear view of what is missing. This is an efficient way of getting something tangible from something as abstract as your manual tests.

MockService Coverage

You can also get coverage of a MockService. For those who do not know what a MockService is, you can describe it as a way of simulating Web Services. This can be used when you don't have the Web Service available. One such situation is before the Web Services themselves are built. That's right you can use soapUI to simulate the future Web Service in order for testers to create test against and even for Client Developers to develop their functionality against.

And this is where MockService Coverage comes in. You can make sure that you have all the functionality of the Web Service Simulated. This in turn makes you certain that the tests are created against a complete Web Service which increases the test quality.

Conclusion

This shows the basic flow of Coverage in practice and show how you can improve Test Quality and Improve Testing speed.