Testing? You bet your BPEL you need testing

Colin Adam and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Narendra Patil, president, CEO, and co-founder of Optimyz, to talk about the challenges around SOA and Web services testing. 

The bottom line is that end users will access services as an entire business process -- not as a single operation, he explains. That's why testing should leverage Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which can check for dependencies and intermediate operations between the services that make up the business process.  "Thousands of users are not going to access a single operation of your Web services, they’re going to access your entire business process," he says. "It follows then that you wouldn’t want to load individual operations but your entire business process. Your real-world usage may consist of thousands of users connecting to your business process simultaneously so you need to be able to simulate and monitor that in an efficient manner."  A transcript of the interview can be found here.