An AGENDA for testing relational database applications

Database systems play an important role in nearly every modern organization, yet relatively little research effort has focused on how to test them. This paper discusses issues arising in testing database systems, presents an approach to testing database applications, and describes AGENDA, a set of tools to facilitate the use of this approach. In testing such applications, the state of the database before and after the user's operation plays an important role, along with the user's input and the system output. A framework for testing database applications is introduced. A complete tool set, based on this framework, has been prototyped. The components of this system are a parsing tool that gathers relevant information from the database schema and application, a tool that populates the database with meaningful data that satisfy database constraints, a tool that generates test cases for the application, a tool that checks the resulting database state after operations are performed by a database application, and a tool that assists the tester in checking the database application's output. The design and implementation of each component of the system are discussed. The prototype described here is limited to applications consisting of a single SQL query. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.