Web Services Testing

I recently raised an RFA on Web Services Testing.

What strategy and tools are people using for testing Web Services in CSC? My client is currently starting to build some but has no environment or tools in which to test. The providing application is expecting WS-I Basic Profile-compliant SOAP/XML calls. Some orchestration and performance testing capabilities in the testing environment are desirable.

One response pointed me to Web Services Help a website run by Peter J Wood (a fellow CSCer)which discusses use of a tool called SOAPscope from Mindreef. Peter himself recommended looking at Optimyz which allows you to test the orchestration layer (BPEL) in addition to discrete web services, although he says it is not as mature as SOAPscope.

But nobody really answered the question about testing strategy. I found a couple of useful White papers on the Wipro site, but, curiously, the one on testing web services seems to have gone. But Red Gate's paper Web Services Testing describes the same approach, i.e.

Proof-of-concept testing

Functional testing

Regression testing

Load/stress testing and

Monitoring

The paper goes onto describe how their tool supports stress/load testing. It misses testing out the orchestration aspects, though - I think this is another required testing step. Anybody got any other pointers?