Previously I wrote this SoapUI blog as I was looking to improve some integration testing against a web service. This blog page looks a bit deeper at the problem and how SoapUI could help.
Use case: Testing integration of complex web services
Lets say you have an application which uses an external parties web service. You have no control over the design of the third party service. In addition its not possible to have a copy of the application. The organization providing the service will provide a user acceptance version but that is all. The service wraps something complex, its difficult to setup, and requires many other dependencies to operate correctly. It would be to expensive an option to have a development instance. Lets call this service xorg-ws, and our application xorg-integration.
This situation gives the developers of xorg-integration a problem. They want to write integration tests, but a full end to end test is not possible because we don’t have a suitable xorg-ws environment for testing against. Our contract with xorg-ws is in the form of the WSDL definition. We have some understanding of that contract and how to use the data returned. At the very least we would like to test, how our application integrates against the contract.
