There are many dimensions to SOA testing. They include services, processes, and performance.

Service-level testing is the most important, since core services are the foundation of the SOA. However, services are written very differently, depending upon the developer, with some services perhaps too course-grained, and some service too fine-grained, and many other services poorly designed. Services may also be built on top of existing interfaces and APIs, and thus are even more complex and more in need of quality assurance testing since you’re placing an interface layer on top of an interface layer. There is no magic here; it’s a matter of validating the services for their intended use, verifying that the interfaces function correctly, and validating both WSDL and schema. Also, you need to consider diagnostics for design-time and run-time, and make sure to address those older, but important notions of unit, functional, and regression testing.

Read more at: InfoWorld