Web services have become an integral part of many websites and products we have been called on to test. Testing the functionality of the application is still the straight forward method that we propose in our standard training–even if web services may require a small amount of harness building.
Service oriented applications may have data which extends beyond the display layer, such as messages which initiate a new process or procedure. Testing those messages without a back end, code driven tool can present quite a challenge.
Most testers just want to get to testing, and would like to avoid generating an application which has to be re written each time the process or data changes. To facilitate this, SmarteSoft currently recommends creating a simple form that accesses the WSDL from the server. This simple piece of HTML will provide for the inputs as well as the outputs. As this service page is created it will allow for both functional testing of the web service, as well as load testing.