Editorial Preface: Web Services Quality Testing

Simply put, a Web service refers to a programmable Web application that is universally accessible using standard Internet protocols. This paradigm of Web services has been changing the Internet from a repository of data into a repository of services along the following three dimensions: (1) By means that business organizations expose their services on the Internet and make them accessible via standard programmatic interfaces, this model of Web services offers a promising way to facilitate Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration within and across organizational boundaries; (2) The Web services technology provides a uniform framework to increase cross-language and cross-platform interoperability for distributed computing and resource sharing over the Internet; and (3) This paradigm of Web services opens a new cost-effective way of engineering software to quickly develop and deploy Web applications by dynamically integrating other published Web services components to conduct new business transactions. In one word, the paradigm of Web services is thus considered to be the strategic model for the next generation of Internet computing (Zhang, 2004). Gartner Group, a leading industry analyst firm, predicted that by 2008 more than 60 % of the business will adopt Web services technique and transform into new forms of enterprises (Pezzini, 2003)