The service-oriented approach has become more and more popular, now allowing
highly integrated and yet heterogeneous applications. Web services are the
natural evolution of conventional middleware technologies to support Web-based
and enterprise-level integration. The highly dynamic characteristics of
service-oriented applications means their validation is a continuous process
that often runs in parallel with execution. It is not possible to clearly
distinguish between the predeployment validation of a system and its use, nor is
it possible to guarantee that the checks passed at a certain time will be passed
at a later time and in the actual execution environment as well. Baresi and Di
Nitto have put together the first reference on all aspects of testing and
validating service-oriented architectures, taking into account these inherent
intricacies. The contributions by leading academic and industrial research
groups are structured into four parts on: static analysis to acquire insight
into how the system is supposed to work; testing techniques to sample its actual
behavior; monitoring to probe its operational performance; and nonfunctional
requirements like reliability and trust. This monograph is an initial source of
knowledge for researchers in both academia and industry in the field of
service-oriented architecture validation and verification approaches. They will
find a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches as well as techniques
and tools to improve the quality of service-oriented applications.