The service-oriented approach has become more and more popular, now allowing highly integrated and yet heterogeneous applications. Web services are the natural evolution of conventional middleware technologies to support Web-based and enterprise-level integration.
The highly dynamic characteristics of service-oriented applications means their validation is a continuous process that often runs in parallel with execution. It is not possible to clearly distinguish between the predeployment validation of a system and its use, nor is it possible to guarantee that the checks passed at a certain time will be passed at a later time and in the actual execution environment as well.
