Mining Service Behavior for Stateful Service Emulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for modeling stateful services by analyzing interaction traces to improve service emulation accuracy, addressing limitations of existing virtualization techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to derive service models that incorporate service state, enhancing response accuracy during testing of stateful services.

Findings

Improved accuracy in service response generation.

Enhanced efficiency over existing methods.

Effective modeling of both stateful and stateless services.

Abstract

Enterprise software systems are increasingly integrating with diverse services to meet expanding business demands. Testing these highly interconnected systems presents a challenge due to the need for access to the connected services. Service virtualization has emerged as a widely used technique to derive service models from recorded interactions, for service response generation during system testing. Various methods have been proposed to emulate actual service behavior based on these interactions, but most fail to account for the service's state, which reduces the accuracy of service emulation and the realism of the testing environment, especially when dealing with stateful services. This paper proposes an approach to deriving service models from service interactions, which enhance the accuracy of response generation by considering service state. This is achieved by uncovering contextual dependencies among interaction messages and analyzing the relationships between message data values. The approach is evaluated using interaction traces collected from both stateful and stateless services, and the results reveal notable enhancements in accuracy and efficiency over existing approaches in service response generation.