"As enterprises extend their implementations of web services and SOA," said Wayne Ariola, President of Corporate Development at Parasoft (pictured talking earlier with SYS-CON.TV), "their testing and validation of those services requires the ability to generate test scenarios that fully represent the complexity of the business transactions to be enacted by them and the heterogeneous infrastructures of messaging and transport protocols they will be based on. This is a major challenge."

Ariola was speaking as Parasoft announced the release of Parasoft SOA Test 4.1, its automated test and analysis product for web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations. 

The new release extends support for the testing of complex web services transactions and SOA implementations based on heterogeneous messaging and transport protocols. "SOA Test allows users to verify all aspects of a Web service with one comprehensive, automated testing suite," Ariola continues, "ensuring those services meet security, reliability, performance and reuse objectives."

"We continue to extend the capabilities of SOA Test to provide organizations with the support and automation they need to validate their web services for the security, reliability and performance that is required of them." accomplishes that goal, offering automated unit testing, penetration testing, scenario testing, load and performance testing, and regression testing to make sure each of the individual components of the Web service are operating the way you would expect," he said.

Parasoft SOA Test 4.1 adds IBM MQ, TIBCO Rendezvous, and SMTP to the list of messaging and transport protocols it supports for testing and validating XML/SOAP transactions, extending its support for the testing of heterogeneous SOA environments. The release provides for the functional and load testing of Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), allowing EJBs to be tested directly through their remote interfaces without having to go through web or web service interfaces. 

To better enable the configuration of test scenarios that map to complex use case requirements, SOA Test 4.1 provides support for "if/else" and "do while" logic flow within its auto-generated test suites and provides extended control of parameterization of test variables and reference data sources.