The distinction between "message" and "action" gets a bit tricky. Messages are a kind of journal of your interactions with the Web service; each message is a request/response pair stored in a list each time you invoke a Web method. Actions are also messages, but they are kept in a separate area in the GUI. More importantly, actions can be arranged in an arbitrary sequence and replayed in that sequence. Such a replayed sequence is a test script. SOAPscope lets you fortify scripts with realistic behavior; for example, you can pass values among actions in a script so that a subsequent request is altered based on a preceding response.

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Messages become actions when you enable a Recording flag (from a menu selection), so you tweak a message until you arrive at a request/response pair that you've determined will make an acceptable test instance. Then you turn on Recording and invoke the message; the associated action is created in the actions section, where it can be incorporated into a script.

Invoking a Web method to generate messages and actions is fall-off-a-log easy. SOAPscope is a very visual environment; similar to LISA, there is little or no programming involved. Request inputs can be either fixed values (entered manually), global values, or fed in from a data grid (such as a small spreadsheet built into SOAPscope). Also, SOAPscope can perform load testing, but you must first purchase the Mindreef Load Check module. The workloads employed by a load test are scripts imported from workspaces, and they're configured to expose the target Web service to different quantities of virtual clients executing those scripts.

SOAPscope can test the client side of Web services via the SOAPscope Server. You create a set of requests and responses – a request/response pair in this context is called a reaction – and store these pairs with the SOAPscope Server. Point the client to be tested at the server and submit requests. The server will search through the reactions; when it locates one with a stored request that matches the incoming request, it sends back the associated response. The upshot is a mock Web service – not particularly elaborate, but effective.

SOAPscope's documentation is first-rate, particularly helpful to anyone new to SOAP and Web services. And noncoding QA engineers will welcome the tool's code-free environment.

Parasoft SOAtest 5.1

As with other tools, Parasoft’s SOAtest will jump-start a project by automatically creating test cases. Point SOAtest at a WSDL; the tool will crawl it and build a set of positive and negative tests for each Web method on the WSDL, so SOAtest's initial boost propels your testing further from the launch pad than the other tools.

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SOAtest's auto-generated tests, though minimal, are instantly executable and are actual tests, not completely empty test skeletons. Each test node in the tool's explorer is accompanied by a “traffic object” subnode that retains the most recent request/response pair generated by that test. So you can execute a test, then click on the traffic object to examine the exact exchange in Literal (unadulterated XML), Tree (a navigable tree explorer), or Element (pseudo code) representation.

All the tests associated with a single Web service are represented as a test suite node, and within that will be yet more test suite nodes, each representing tests on a particular Web method. Only when you get down to single request/response nodes do suites become simply tests.

Although Parasoft follows the standard pattern of representing projects in an explorer tree, nonleaf nodes in the tree are not simply containers. Adjusting attributes on a parent node alters the behavior of all child nodes accordingly. For example, select the test suite node corresponding to a complete Web service, and a tabbed configuration window appears. From that window, you can alter the execution order of all child test suites, setting them to either run sequentially or in parallel, or specifying that, say, Test B execute only if Test A succeeds. Hosts of other attributes – what version of SOAP to use (1.1 or 1.2), message encoding, default timeout, and more – are similarly alterable. This makes for quick and easy manipulation of project-wide behavior.