Software testing is one of the most important techniques used to assure the quality of Web services at present. Test-data generation is an important topic in Web services testing. The quality of test data will influence the efficiency and cost when testing Web services. Based on the contract-based mutation testing technique, this paper presents a method of automated test-data generation for Web services. First, according to the description information and contracts in WSDL documents of Web services, initial test data are generated automatically by the random method. Then the test data are selected using contract mutation testing. This method can generate a test suite meeting a certain contract mutation score, which indicates the quality and efficiency of testing. Finally, we have developed a prototype on the Microsoft .NET platform, and carried out some experiments. The results have shown that the proposed method is effective in automated test-data generation for Web services.

Regression testing, which plays an important role in software maintenance, usually relies on test adequacy criteria to select and prioritize test cases. However, with the wide use and reuse of black-box components, such as reusable class libraries and COTS components, it is challenging to establish test adequacy criteria for testing software systems built on components whose source code is not available. Without source code or detailed documents, the misunderstanding between the system integrators and component providers has become a main factor of causing faults in component-based software. In this paper, we apply mutation on interface contracts, which can describe the rights and obligations between component users and providers, to simulate the faults that may occur in this way of software development. The mutation adequacy score for killing the mutants of interface contracts can serve as a test adequacy criterion. We performed an experimental study on three subject systems to evaluate the proposed approach together with four other existing criteria. The experimental results show that our adequacy criterion is helpful for both selecting good-quality test cases and scheduling test cases in an order of exposing faults quickly in regression testing of component-based software.

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