Nowadays, there isn’t a strict distinction between Test team and QA team, and for most Test teams, their goal isn’t to just take features from developers, find defects, and report back their findings. They go way beyond this to assure quality.

Here are some tips about what makes a team a QA team:

Firstly, testers need to learn to test the requirements and design and not wait for code or features to find defects.  They also have to approach this part of a product cycle as a time when their input is crucial.

Second, since testing happens at the end of most product cycles, each person on a project team has a responsibility.

Third, a QA team is not just a team that writes test cases and executes them. It should innovate on ways to improve quality.

Finally: in order to have a successful project team, testers need to collaborate and make compromises testers need to collaborate and make compromises.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/anitag/archive/2011/04/05/qa-or-test-does-the-name-really-matter.aspx

The Open source SOA testing brings new testing challenges and discusses about the main areas of testing, which It mainly describes about four areas of testing that is functional, performance, interoperability and security testing of the services.

Functional testing: provides the ability to verify the behavior of the services. Under this testing, regression test suites are built which automates testing and expected behavior of services so that the lifecycle of service revisions can be quickly assessed and the functionalities can be validated

Performance testing: provides concurrent, simultaneous loading agent framework which is helpful to determine throughput and capacity statistics of the back-end service as well as identifies bottlenecks and potential architectural weaknesses and performance dependencies.

Interoperability testing: maximizes the interoperability of the service. This can be achieved by measuring the design characteristics of the service and runtime adherence to standards and best-practices

Security testing: assesses the risk bearing and robustness of the service with respect to vulnerability, data leakage, data privacy and data integrity

Source: http://www.ezine4i.com/Computers-articles/article-33034/Open-Source-SOA-Testing-Tools