Test Adequacy Evaluation for the User-database Interaction: A Specification-Based Approach

Abstract

Testing a database application is a challenging process where both the database and the user interaction have to be considered in the design of test cases. This paper describes a specification-based approach to guide the design of test inputs (both the test database and the user inputs) for a database application and to automatically evaluate the test adequacy. First, the system specification of the application is modelled: (1) the structure of the database and the user interface are represented in a single model, called Integrated Data Model (IDM), (2) the functional requirements are expressed as a set of business rules, written in terms of the IDM. Then, a MCDC-based criterion is applied over the business rules to automatically derive the situations of interest to be tested (test requirements), which guide the design of the test inputs. Finally, the adequacy of these test inputs is automatically evaluated to determine whether the test requirements are covered. The approach has been applied to the TPC-C benchmark. The results show that it allows designing test cases that are able to detect interesting faults which were located in the procedural code of the implementation.

Advanced management of data integrity: property-based testing for business rules

“…A specific data coverage measurement could be developed to go along with our methodology, which accounted for the number of data tables/buckets which are indeed used during the execution of test sequences. Alternatively, business rules themselves could be used as oracle for coverage criteria as well (Blanco et al 2012).…”

Early Integration Testing for Entity Reconciliation in the Context of Heterogeneous Data Sources

“…The business rules, which are statements that define or constrain the business structure or the business behaviour [41], have been used in other approaches focused on testing database applications, such as [42] and [43]. On the other hand, as the integration rules are based on the system specification, they could also be used to generate some implementation of the ER application.…”

“…After defining the ITR models, we applied a Masking modified condition decision coverage (MCDC)-based criterion over the conditions imposed by the integration rules to derive the test coverage items, that is, the situations of interest to be tested. This criterion has demonstrated its utility in previous work, such as [51] (for testing SQL queries) and [42] (for testing the user-database interaction).…”

A test model for graph database applications: an MDA-based approach

“…Works that define program-based adequacy criteria range from criteria for procedural code that take into account the SQL queries [10], to criteria specially designed to deal with the SQL statements [14], [15], [32], [33], [35] and tools to automate the criteria [16], [31], [39]. Other works define specification-based adequacy criteria, such as [4]. The generation of test inputs has been addressed in several works: [3], [23], [36] generate test databases and [7], [24] both test database and program inputs.…”

“…Model-based testing (MBT) has been used in several database testing works, such as [4], [9], [11], [18]. In MBT, the system is modelled to identify the important aspect to be tested regarding the expected system behaviour, obtaining a test model.…”