In the context of a service-oriented architecture, the notion of testing Web services, and which tools to use, is evolving.
"[Most customers] haven't gotten to the point of maturity to know what they need," said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. "And there is still a real lack of solutions for doing any real testing of Web services in the context of SOA."
Different vendors offer different pieces of the puzzle, Bloomberg said, such as diagnostics, load and performance testing, asynchronous capabilities, and orchestration and versioning. "But nobody is looking at the whole picture from the perspective of a SOA; larger vendors are looking at some aspects, but there are still a lot of pieces to fall in place," he said.
User organizations aren't looking at the whole picture yet, either, said Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "The end-to-end, actual testing of Web services -- user companies are less likely to do -- and they are almost always focused on the user interface. They rarely dig under the UI, where most robust testing comes in."
