Non-functional testing of web services
There are multiple non-functional requirements expected from the web services which are included in your SOA. A few of these non-functional aspects can be:
Scalability
Usability
Performance
Extensibility
Reliability
Web services are dealt with relatively complex XML message processing. As one of the promises of using web services is to communicate with heterogeneous systems, there are a lot of heavy XML serialization/de-serialization tasks used. These complexities multiply by greater levels when the messages are enriched with various Quality of Service (QoS) options such as the WS-* headers. For example, when SOAP messages are secured with message-level security policies such as encryption, the SOAP engine has to process all security headers in addition to the raw SOAP message in order to dispatch the message to the correct method of the service implementation class. With these facts, we can argue that there can be a considerable slowness introduced by SOAP...
