SOA testing tool survey

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the corresponding Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm have received significant attention as major computer and software companies, such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, HP, SAP, and Sun Microsystems, have embraced SOA, as well as government agencies such as U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). As more and more applications are built using SOA, actively and aggressively testing services and applications becomes crucial.
Web services are autonomous, modular components that can be described, published by service producers in service registry, and discovered and invoked by service consumers to compose the SOA applications. Aside from traditional functional and performance testing, interopertability and vulnerability testing also need to be performed to ensure services and applications built on them meet the requirements. A number of testing tools have been developed to assist SOA software engineers to test services and applications more efficiently.
SOAPSonar is a comprehensive SOA testing tool developed by the SOA testing leader, CrosscheckNet. SOAPSonar provides enterprise class SOA Web Services testing and diagnostics for ensuring reliable, robust services. It supports functional and regression testing, performance testing, interoperability testing, and vulnerability testing. For interoperability testing, SOAPSonar supports both design-time and run-time interoperability testing. Developers can run a set of comprehensive WSI Profile tests and reports issues in WSDL files that prevent services from interoperating with each other. For vulnerability and identity testing, it supports identity standards User Name, X.509 and SAML protocol, which are commonly used in the SOA development. Although, SOAPSonar provides supports of atomic service testing and operation chaining testing, it fails to provide dependency analysis for regresssion testing based on workflows, application templates, collaboration templates.
SOAPscope, an SOA development suite, provides a testing tool called SOAPscope Tester. Claimed by Mindreef, the company that developed SOAPscope, the testing support provided by SOAPscope is through the whole lifecylce of SOA development, SOAPscope is quality driven SOA. SOAPscopte tester allow developers to test web services by dynamically creating a request using the SOAPscopte UI, sending the request to the server, and displaying the results. It can run the functional tests stored in Test Suites automatically, however all test cases in the Test Suites have to be added manually as importing external testing cases is not supported(? needs to be verified). It can also create service simulation either by capturing SOAP messages or directly from a WSDL file. Unlike SOAPSonar, SOAPscopte does not support interoperability and vulnerability testng. SOAPscope Tester did not address issues with workflows, application templates and collaboration templates either, therefore its regression testing lacks dependency analysis and traceability.
ITKO LISA 4 SOA Testing and Validation suite, developed by ITKO, is a testing/simulation tool featured with Lisa Virtual Service Environment which captures service behavivors and virtualized them. Because of this virtual environment, development and testing is freed from havig to deploy. It supports functional and regression testing, end-to-end integration testing, performance testing as well as monitoring after deployment. All of LISA’s test functionaility is an independently developed platform, so it minizes the risk in complex, changing enterprise appplicaitons, however, it also hinders the sharing of test cases which, in return, is against the principle of SOA.