Efficient regression testing of ontology-driven systems

Abstract

To manage and integrate information gathered from heterogeneous databases, an ontology is often used. Like all systems, ontology-driven systems evolve over time and must be regression tested to gain confidence in the behavior of the modified system. Because rerunning all existing tests can be extremely expensive, researchers have developed regressiontest-selection (RTS) techniques that select a subset of the available tests that are affected by the changes, and use this subset to test the modified system. Existing RTS techniques have been shown to be effective, but they operate on the code and are unable to handle changes that involve ontologies. To address this limitation, we developed and present in this paper a novel RTS technique that targets ontologydriven systems. Our technique creates representations of the old and new ontologies, compares them to identify entities affected by the changes, and uses this information to select the subset of tests to rerun. We also describe in this paper OntoReTest, a tool that implements our technique and that we used to empirically evaluate our approach on two biomedical ontology-driven database systems. The results of our evaluation show that our technique is both efficient and effective in selecting tests to rerun and in reducing the overall time required to perform regression testing.

The Analytic Information Warehouse (AIW): A platform for analytics using electronic health record data

“…The ontological storage of data definitions and abstraction definitions enables efficient and systematic testing of the impact of changes to a data or abstraction definition on derived information generated by AIW. We are creating a framework for running such tests [79]. …”

Ontology-Based Regression Testing: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The study [41] focused on ontology-driven systems for regression testing. The study involved targeted ontologies rather than using the code of programs.…”

“…Adaptive testing is a steady job that requires sources for testing web services. The cost issue is widely identified in ontology-based studies [41,42,47].…”

Recent Advances in Regression Testing Techniques

“…Kim et al [44] presented a RTS technique aimed for ontology-driven database systems because traditional RTS approaches cannot be applied for such systems; changes in ontology systems are typically semantics and descriptions of the data rather than code modifications. The proposed technique builds graphs for the original and modified ontologies.…”