Testing web services

When I'm working on projects where we're testing web services, it often means comparing XML files to determine if our tests passed or failed. I've found that working with that much XML means you're going to have to get good at:

• writing XSLTs to transform your actual response to mask out values you don't care about (server dates for example);


• writing Xpath queries to check for specific values in an XML document;


• learning all the command line options on your favorite diff-tool;


• and ensuring you have at least one person on the team that knows the schema inside and out and can see the entire mapping document in their head when they look at the response files.