SoapUi and DevOps

There is a tendency among engineers to disparage the tools of other engineers. So, developers don't like to develop tests with gui based tools for example.

Sometimes a tool is indeed not worthy an engineers attention, for example a 'Golf-Ware' tool. These are tools that management learned about during a round of golf with a salesperson, and then force down the throats of unwilling devs and ops.

Is Soapui such a tool? or do we like it? Lets find out!

First of all SoapUI is a tool that, as the name might be suspected to imply, is used to test Soap backends. The idea is pretty straightforward:

• Feed a Soap end point with a predetermined Soap request
• Read the data returned by the endpoint
• Verify the data returned by the endpoint

You can do this with some basic shellscripting using curl and sed for instance, or some xml hackery based on xpath perhaps.

So what does SoapUI bring to the table then?

• It has a GUI. This is nothing to scoff at really. People can run your tests

and interpret the results withouth knowing what curl -H does.

• Apart from the gui, it can be run from the commandline
• The test files are just straightforward xml files, not binary blobs
• SoapUI can be integrated in your builds.

So in conclusion, yeah, SoapUI is likeable!