distributedlife

How a service is implemented also impacts how it is tested and who does the testing. SOAP services are, from a tester’s perspective easier to test than WCF services. This is because there is greater tooling support for testing SOAP services. WCF testing tools are coming along but they are not as many and not all are feature rich. If you’re expecting dedicated testers to test your services then consider your service implementation before you start.

No wait. That would be designing for testability and at that level, changing your implementation platform to support testing, is too dramatic. I suggest that if you want dedicated testers to test your services at both the services in isolation and service integration level, then you need to be mindful of what tools are available. If there isn’t support available, work with your testers to ensure that they can test. This may mean that you produce a testing harness for them to use.

The real problem is that service testing falls under the realm of the dedicated testing team, the traditional testers. However, services are technical in nature which lends them to be tested by a developer. I talked about the options available here and the choice you and your organisation makes is one that is driven by many more factors than “ease of development”.