Model-based Testing in Cloud Brokerage Scenarios

In future Cloud ecosystems, brokers will mediate between service providers and consumers, playing an increased role in quality assurance, checking services for functional compliance to agreed standards, among other aspects. To date, most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) testing has been performed manually, requiring duplicated effort at the development, certification and deployment stages of the service lifecycle. This paper presents a strategy for achieving automated testing for certification and re-certification of SaaS applications, based on the adoption of simple state-based and functional specifications. High-level test suites are generated from specifications, by algorithms that provide the necessary and sufficient coverage. The high-level tests must be grounded for each implementation technology, whether SOAP, REST or rich-client. Two examples of grounding are presented, one into SOAP for a traditional web service and the other into Selenium for a SAP HANA rich-client application. The results demonstrate good test coverage. Further work is required to fully automate the grounding.