Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

172 Chapter 9 Testing from SOA to the Clouds
services or from the process layer down to the primitive services. Going from
the bottom up is the recommended approach.
Governance-Level Testing
As you may recall from Chapter 8, “Bringing Governance to the Clouds,”
governance requires that you have lifecycle and policy management layers
that need testing. No problem. We test governance systems by matching the
policies managed and controlled by the governance system with the actual
way they manage and control them. It is a simple matter of listing the policies
and establishing test cases for each.
Work with the governance technology provider to determine the best approach
for testing the governance implemented in the system.
Integration-Level Testing
As with traditional integration testing, the purpose of this step is to figure out
if all of the interfaces, including behavior and information sharing between the
services, are working correctly. The integration testing should work through
the layers of communications, working up through the network to the protocols
and interprocess communications, including testing the Representational
State Transfer (REST) or Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces to
the services or whatever communication mechanism is employed by the services
in use.
Following are some things to look for in integration-level testing:
Can communications be established with late binding, meaning dynamically
as needed
Is the integration stable under an increasing load
Is the transmitted information correct in semantics and content for the
service or applications
Are the security mechanisms working properly
How does the SOA using cloud computing recover from application,
database, and network failures
Information-Level Testing
This is the process of testing the data persistence layers directly, typically the
databases, without going through the services. We look at the efficiencies and
stability of the database, including