  As per leading IT experts, today's large enterprises are going through
business transformations. They are adopting service-based IT models such as SOA
to develop their enterprise information systems and applications. In fact, SOA
is an integration of loosely-coupled interoperable components, possibly built
using heterogeneous software technologies and hardware platforms. As a result,
traditional testing architectures are no more adequate for verifying and
validating the quality of SOA systems and whether they are operating to
specifications. This paper first discusses the various state-of-the-art methods
for testing SOA applications, and then it proposes a novel automated,
distributed, cross-platform, and regression testing architecture for SOA
systems. The proposed testing architecture consists of several testing units
which include test engine, test code generator, test case generator, test
executer, and test monitor units. Experiments conducted showed that the
proposed testing architecture managed to use parallel agents to test
heterogeneous web services whose technologies were incompatible with the
testing framework. As future work, testing non-functional aspects of SOA
applications are to be investigated so as to allow the testing of such
properties as performance, security, availability, and scalability.
