(role)CAST: A Framework for On-line Service Testing

Engineering of service-oriented systems is still an immature discipline. Traditional software engineering approaches do not adequately fit development needs arising in this widely adopted paradigm. In particular, because of dynamic service composition, several engineering activities typically performed off-line (i.e., pre deployment) have to be carried on also on-line (i.e., during real usage). In this paper, we present a framework called (role)cast which supports an instantiation of the concept of on-line testing of services, for the purpose of validating their compliance to role-based service access policies.