Automating UML models merge for web services testing

This paper presents a method for merging UML models, taking place in a quality evaluation framework for Web Services (WS). This framework, called iTac-QoS, is an extended UDDI server (a yellow pages system dedicated to WS), using model based testing to assess quality. WS vendors have to create UML model of their product and our framework extracts tests from it. These tests are ran, and depending on their results, a mark is given to WS. This mark permits to customers to have an idea about the quality of WS they find on our UDDI server. Up today, our framework was limited to WS which did not use other WS. This was due to the fact that it is impossible for vendors to create a good model of a foreign product. Our method for model merging solves this problem: each vendor produces the models of its own product, and we automatically merge the different models. The model produced after this merging represents the composition of the different WS. For each type of diagram present in the models (class, instance or state-chart diagram), a method is proposed in order to produced a unique model. In addition to this, a solution is proposed to merge all OCL code in the class modeling the WS under test. We are currently working on a tool implementing this method.