One of the big benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) development is that it approaches design from a business, as opposed to a technical, point of view. Unfortunately, SOA development projects can be more complicated than "regular" Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) projects. With SOA projects, there are often more stakeholders, more disparate technologies to integrate, and more possible misunderstandings about overall project goals.

Testing in such an environment can be complicated—from both a technical and an organizational perspective. To properly test an SOA deployment, you need to test the set of Web services, the individual applications that implement the Web services, and the business processes that handle the orchestration of these services.

This article describes how to test a BPEL process by using the Oracle BPEL Test Framework. This framework, part of Oracle BPEL Process Manager, provides a way to create and execute a set of repeatable tests on a BPEL process. In addition, this article also offers some best practices borrowed from traditional integration and agile development projects to help developers, project managers, and testers working in an SOA environment.

Read the complete article by Lonneke Dikmans in Oracle Magazine.