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ABSTRACT

White-box testing is an important part of every software testing and quality assurance strategy. Testing database-driven applications requires the adoption of white-box testing, but it is not clear what adoption is needed. Instead of focusing on a single problem and a possible solution, this paper elaborates all of the main challenges from a practitioner's view. Starting with a generic testing process, we analyze for each process step whether and, if so, which adoptions are needed, and redefine the concepts of test cases and coverage. We discuss test database state generation methods and the problem of scheduling test cases efficiently. Thereby, we provide a road map for the emerging domain of testing database-driven applications and for making such testing useful for commercial software development.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

  H. Information Systems
  H.0 GENERAL

Keywords:
databases, information systems, test coverage, testing