Adapting Test-Driven Development to Build Robust Web Services

Web services are increasingly being used in business critical environments as a mean to provide a service or integrate distinct software services. Research indicates that, in many cases, services are deployed with robustness issues (i.e., displaying unexpected behaviors when in presence of invalid input conditions). Recently, Test-Driven Development (TDD) emerged as software development technique based on test cases that are defined before development, as a way to validate functionalities. However, programmers typically disregard the verification of limit conditions, such as the ones targeted by robustness testing. Moreover, in TDD, tests are created before developing the functionality, conflicting with the typical robustness testing approach. This chapter discusses the integration of robustness testing in TDD for improving the robustness of web services during development. The authors requested three programmers to create a set of services based on open-source code and to implement different versions of the services specified by TPC-App, using both TDD and the approach presented in this chapter. Results indicate that TDD with robustness testing is an effective way to create more robust services.