It's good to learn from your own mistakes, but even better to learn from the mistakes of others. Randy Rice presents case studies of testing projects that have gone horribly wrong and reveals the one characteristic they all have in common. Although many of these projects ultimately ended in failure, Randy presents examples where mid-course corrective actions were very successful. Learn important lessons that address test team organization, test environment design, working with software developers, test outsourcing, test tool integration, team building, and the importance of strong leadership to the success of your testing. Find out how to become a change agent and what you need to do in order to turn around testing projects that are headed toward disaster. Avoid the mistakes of others and focus your efforts in leading your test team to get the best possible results.

David Fern demystifies Web services technology, explaining that Web services are loosely coupled, language independent processes that communicate following SOAP standards using XML messages. He describes how to ensure the quality and compatibility of these unique applications by addressing their specific challenges and risk mitigation test strategies. David shares some of the tools that help him perform functional testing as you would with a GUI application-compare and validate the request and response XML files, ensure language independence and cross platform compatibility with .NET and Java services, and ensure that the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) specifications meet the Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I) standards. Finally, David describes how to integrate these tools and strategies to support and automate your Web service testing process.

• Web services and how they work

While testing major architectural changes to a legacy product, it became clear to Andy and Ronelle's team that without a close association between test cases and application requirements there was no assurance that these requirement were met. They detail the processes, tools, and workflows their team developed to produce high quality, searchable, well documented test suites that provided direct transfer of testing requirements from developers to test engineers. These test suites now serve as a continuous verification that the product functions remain current in their dynamic development environment. Any test failure is a clear indicator that the product does not implement the functionality called for in the specification. Reporting capabilities of the tools provide insight into the progress of testing throughout the development cycle.

Functional testers assigned to their first SOA application can easily be caught off guard by some of the challenges posed by the SOA architecture. Testing without a user interface, the importance of security and performance, and the heavy emphasis on negative testing all require testers to approach SOA applications with new tools, techniques, and a different attitude. Through practical demonstrations of open source and commercial tools, Brian Bryson demonstrates techniques to test SOA applications. Brian starts by building and deploying a Web service, the main building block of SOA applications. Then, he tests this Web service from the ground up beginning with functional unit testing using jUnit and progressing to infrastructure testing using SoapClient and Eclipse. Brian concludes with a discussion of security and performance testing issues.