Mindreef eyes automated Web service tests

Mindreef plans to expand its Web services testing capabilities in the second quarter of this year to automate test scenarios based on WSDL contracts.

Load testing for Web services also is a focus for the company, which makes software for Web services testing and SOA quality management.

With the planned Test Suites addition to the company's SOAPscope Server product, users will be able to automate multitudes of tests instead of having to perform them manually, said Jim Murphy, vice president of product management at Mindreef.

"Our customers have been building up these scenarios but now they may have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these scenarios they've been building up," said Murphy. With Test Suites, users could have multiple, automated tests run every night, he said.

An example of a Web service test scenario would be one that logs into a central authentication service, checks credentials for an order entry system, and then passes this information to order management and inventory management systems.

Featured as part of the Test Suites capability will be an interface to automate the execution of test scenarios. "It's kind of just taking it up a level of abstraction," Murphy said.

The capability builds upon current SOAPscope functionality.

"What we provide right now is more of an ad hoc testing," for Web services, said Frank Grossman, co-founder and CTO of Mindreef. Right now, it is easy to invoke a service and check the values coming back, but this does not make it easy to fully automate the process, Grossman said.

In the load testing arena, Mindreef plans to add Load Test, featuring easy-to-use functional test tools, to SOAPscope Server. These tools would be usable by persons not experienced with XML, said Murphy. The intent is to provide load testing at the earliest stage of the development cycle.

Load testing can check for transaction volumes against Web services endpoints, for example, Murphy said.

Mindreef reported this week that it doubled sales in 2006 over 2005 and surpassed 3,000 customers and 43,000 downloads of its SOAPscope products.