Automated test plan generator for database applications systems

Abstract

As database applications become larger and more complex, the development of suitable test plans to assure robust and reliable software becomes essential. The testing procedure must establish the applications reliability from the human expectation viewpoint as well as its correctness and robustness.The predetermined goals of this testing procedure are to assure high reliability of the application and ascertain that the software performed according to specifications, while remaining within the project's time and budgetary constraints. Errors identified during development can be corrected with minimal cost when compared to errors uncovered by users after the software release. By overlapping testing with development, and automating the production of a standardized set of test plans, the incremental production time can be minimized. By generating an application specific test plan, syntactic and semantic specifications of the actual system applications can be tested. A side effect of this specific, interleaved correctness testing is the uncovering of user interface inconsistencies and their refinement before exposure of the application to the real end user.Analysis of the results of our experimental testing showed the keystone to be the test plan. Since the completeness and veracity of this document is a prime determining factor in the validity of the testing, we have developed program using C++ on a Sun workstation to automatically generate test plans from the design schema.This paper presents an automated/manual testing scheme suitable for assuring the validity of large database applications. The initial premises, design execution and consequences of the test procedure is detailed followed by a description of the automation of strategic components.