Testability of Database Applications

Testability

Testability is a non-functional requirement important to the testing team members and the users who are involved in user acceptance testing.

Testability is mainly depends on the degree on which software team works like

• SRS (software requirement specification)
• FRD (Functional Design document)
• Software system, etc.

Support testing for the software application under test.

Minimum number of test cases that covers the entire testing scope without missing any requirement and covers the entire test scenario that could introduce a fault or error in a software system.

It will help testing team to enhance the application in best way.

For Projects which doesn’t have GUI, It is really hard to validate the parameters saved to DB are well-formed, validated and as expected. And we don’t have a GUI to validate the same. Also, it has a scope to miss out the functional test cases by just depending on documents.

For such ‘Non-Testable Programs’, We require a methodology of reusing input test data to create additional test cases whose outputs can be predicted. For eg. For any input as ‘x’, expected output is f(x). So, based on already known value of f(x), we can also transform the input parameter to t(x) and hence, new output would be f (t(x)). Now, the already known output and new output should match otherwise this could be considered as a functionality miss. Using this approach, Functional testing can be covered.

Purposes

• Companies maintain data in different types of databases, and also different requirements. In order to achieve a level of functionality to meet said goals, they need to test their database application.
• Testing Database applications basically deals with finding errors so as to eliminate them and make application error-free. This will improve the quality of the database or web-based system.

Why is Testability necessary?

• Database is the collection of interconnected files on a server, storing information, may not be the same type of data, i.e. databases may be heterogeneous. As a result, numerous implementation and integration errors may occur in large database systems, which negatively affect the system’s performance, reliability, consistency and security. Thus, it is important to test in order to obtain a database system which satisfies the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) of a database management system.
• A lot of money is spent on supporting and maintaining a product after its development. Testable products are easy and less costly to maintain. The chances of achieving customer satisfaction with such products are much higher. Hence testability is an important attribute to the maintainability of any software product.
• How to test Database Applications?

Flow Chart for Testing Databases based Applications

Testing Process:

1. Application will save the output data to DB on the basis on input parameters provided.

2. Scripts will be used to perform the same operations for the same set of input data on same table using Command line interface.

3. Result of code and script should be same to specify a test case as pass/fail.