With Easter fast approaching and summer on the horizon, the chances are that you’ll soon be trawling the web looking for holiday destinations, hotels and flights. For those of us booking in a rush or looking for a last minute bargain, there are plenty of websites out there happy to do the heavy lifting. Fill in a few fields and you’re on your way to Rome, Barcelona or Rijeka.
While we take it for granted that these web services bring back the best flights at the best prices, a lot of work goes into ensuring that the process runs smoothly. “If I were developing a web service for a travel agency, flight carriers would give me the means to connect to their own web services,” says SnT researcher Dr. Cesare Bartolini. “It would then be my job to make sure that when a customer enters their travel preferences on the travel agent’s web service this information makes its way to the right fields of the flight carrier’s web service. And then I’d need to make sure that the right output makes its way safely to the customer.”
So far, so good. But suppose that the customer receives the wrong information. “It could be a problem with the flight carrier’s software, or it could be that my service sent the wrong input,” continues Bartolini. “Or maybe there’s a problem with the way my service is interpreting the output from the carrier – there are lots of places where this could be going wrong.”
Ten Year Most Influential Paper Award
Ten years ago, Bartolini was developing an algorithm to help identify exactly where such problems lie. The resulting paper, “WS-TAXI: a WSDL-based Testing Tool for Web Services“, recently won the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation’s (ICST) Ten Year Most Influential Paper award.
The Challenge of Black Box Testing
In 2009, web services presented a significant challenge to researchers aiming to automate the testing process. While the travel agency would have unlimited access to their own source code, they would only be able to test the flight carrier’s website through the user interface. This “black box” testing involved bombarding the interface with all possible inputs and interpreting the results – a time- and resource-intensive process, with some companies even charging for the privilege of accessing their services.
“Our team developed an algorithm which greatly reduced the number of instances you had to test, and it did so in an intelligent manner,” says Bartolini. “Testers could set the parameters, choosing the right trade-off between depth of testing and efficiency of time and resources. This was innovative at the time, and the Ten Year Most Influential Paper award recognises that the idea went on to inspire a lot of other researchers.”
Interdisciplinary Research in ICT and Law
Today, Bartolini conducts research in data protection, and with a PhD in computer science and a Master’s in law he is perfectly placed to understand the subject from both an IT and legal perspective. “We build mathematical models of regulations, such as the GDPR, and security standards,” he says. “Using these models we can find correlations between regulations and the technical standards used by organisations as guidelines to secure their data.” These models could then be used, for example, in automating compliance checks.
“Although I haven’t worked on web service testing for a long time, it’s interesting to see how my research in that field is still useful in my current work. In one of my latest papers, I used BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) – a language I learnt for web service testing. When you’re involved in interdisciplinary research, you never know where different skills might be useful.”
SnT is turning 10! We’ve come a long way since launching our activities in 2009. Today, nearly 300 talented people work together to innovate in Luxembourg and around the world. Stay tuned for a year full of celebrations, excellence in research and new milestones.
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