A solution is proposed for testing a notification-based software application in a service oriented data processing environment (e.g., implementing the WS-Notification specification). The software application includes one or more notification producers. Each notification producer is adapted to distribute notification messages (e.g., of the SOAP type) to notification consumers that are subscribed thereto—according to a specification defined in a corresponding publication, such as a WSDL document. For each notification producer, a corresponding method starts with the step of creating a subscribe request according to the publication—in order to subscribe a tester as a notification consumer to the notification producer. The subscribe request is then submitted to the notification producer. At this point, there is verified a result of the subscription. The method continues by verifying a reception by the tester of a test notification message from the notification producer.