A Service-Oriented Reference Architecture for Software Testing Tools

Software testing is recognized as a fundamental activity for assuring software quality. Aiming at supporting this activity, a diversity of testing tools has been developed, including tools based on SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In another perspective, reference architectures have played a significant role in aggregating knowledge of a given domain, contributing to the success in the development of systems for that domain. However, there exists no reference architecture for the testing domain that contribute to the development of testing tools based on SOA. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is to present a service-oriented reference architecture, named RefTEST-SOA. (Reference Architecture for Software Testing Tools based on SOA), that comprises knowledge and experience about how to structure testing tools organized as services and pursues a better integration, scalability, and reuse provided by SOA to such tools. Results of our case studies have showed that RefTEST-SOA is a viable and reusable element to the development of service-oriented testing tools.