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Building Test Cases and Oracles to Automate the Testing of Web Database Applications
Information and Software Technology (2009)
  • Lihua Ran
  • Curtis Dyreson, Utah State University
  • Anneliese Andrews
  • Reene Bryce
  • Christopher Mallery
Abstract

Many organizations rely on web applications that use back-end databases to store important data. Testing such applications requires significant effort. Manual testing alone is often impractical, so testers also rely on automated testing techniques. However, current automated testing techniques may produce false positives (or false negatives) even in a perfectly working system because the outcome of a test case depends on the state of the database which changes over time as data is inserted and deleted. The Automatic Database Tester (AutoDBT) generates functional test cases that account for database updates. AutoDBT takes as input a model of the application and a set of testing criteria. The model consists of a state transition diagram that shows how users navigate pages, a data specification that captures how data flows, and an update specification that shows how the database is updated. AutoDBT generates guard queries to determine whether the database is in a state conducive to performing and evaluating tests. AutoDBT also generates partial oracles to help validate whether a back-end database is updated correctly during testing. This paper describes the design of AutoDBT, a prototype implementation, several experiments with the prototype, and four case studies.

Keywords
  • Test,
  • oracles,
  • automate,
  • testing,
  • web,
  • database,
  • applications
Disciplines
Publication Date
February, 2009
Citation Information
Lihua Ran, Curtis Dyreson, Anneliese Andrews, Reene Bryce, et al.. "Building Test Cases and Oracles to Automate the Testing of Web Database Applications" Information and Software Technology Vol. 51 Iss. 2 (2009)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/curtis_dyreson/6/