Testing Web services by themselves, or software with a simple Web services wrapper, is straightforward, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “The challenges come when you start thinking about Web services in the context of a service-oriented architecture,” he said.

“In an SOA with multiple services, you look at meta data associated with those services — whether that’s a registry or a repository of services information — and you test the functionality not of the individual service, but whether you’re handling versioning properly, [for example].” “These runtime questions blur into design-time questions.”

Traditionally, the software world thinks of design as development-centric, and runtime as operation-centric, Bloomberg said. “With SOA that distinction blurs: You’re updating services on an ongoing basis, you have all the issues of operations testing and management, you’re still doing development work and now development work breaks into infrastructure stuff. You’re still doing component-based testing, but you have application development done at the process level, with composite applications built out of services.”

Bloomberg said: “[Ultimately,] design versus runtime [testing] is two sides of the same coin. You have to make sure the code is working, but you also have to make sure the services and operation are working, too.”

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