Testing BPEL-based Systems

Future web-based systems will require a multitude of systems, including legacy systems, to be integrated. This integration process will be in response to business processes and protocols. These protocols will require the assemblage and orchestration of a large number of components; and as these protocols will frequently change, the respective orchestration structures need to be flexible and easy to evolve. Hence, the introduction of BPEL (and variants like BPEL4WS) to express these structures providing standardized mechanisms to prevent bespoke technology lock-in. BPEL is designed to allow these evolutions to be implemented by end-users (domain rather than technical experts); while these languages support this objective, they lack any mechanisms to support their verification or to increase their testability!