Swiss cheese test case generation for web services testing

Current Web services testing techniques are unable to assure the desired level of trustworthiness, which presents a barrier to WS applications in mission and business critical environments. This paper presents a framework that assures the trustworthiness of Web services. New assurance techniques are developed within the framework, including specification verification via completeness and consistency checking, test case generation, and automated Web services testing. Traditional test case generation methods only generate positive test cases that verify the functionality of software. The proposed Swiss Cheese test case generation method is designed to generate both positive and negative test cases that also reveal the vulnerability of Web services. This integrated development process is implemented in a case study. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach. It also reveals that the Swiss Cheese negative testing detects even more faults than positive testing and thus significantly reduces the vulnerability of Web services.