Connectedness testing of RESTful web-services

In the context of RESTful web-services, connectedness refers to the property wherein every resource in the web-service is reachable from the base resource by successive HTTP GET requests. Presence (or absence) of connectedness has practical implications and hence is an important property of RESTful web-services. In this article, we present an algorithm for testing the connectedness of RESTful webservices. Using a formal specification of the web-service, our algorithm tests the connectedness of a web-service automatically. We also discuss a formal notation we have developed to specify RESTful web-services. Using our notation, we wrote the formal specification for a prototype RESTful web-service which has been developed for internal use in our organisation. Using this specification we employed our method to conduct automated testing of the above webservice. Many functional defects apart from those related to connectedness were detected early during development. This demonstrated that both our specification notation and our testing method are promising innovations in the direction of specification and testing of RESTful web-services.