1. Data-Driven Transaction Based Unit Tests Engin Yorgancıoğlu Volkan Sevinçok Turkey

2. 2 Why automate unit tests?  Automation of unit tests allows regression testing, by which functionality and quality can be continuously tracked.

3. 3 What is DTUT?  DTUT “Data-Driven Transaction-Based Unit Test” helps fast test development with increased test-case maintainability in applications based on similar architectures to that of application-under-test.

4. 4 What do we mean by “transaction” ?  “Transaction” in this context refers to the specific transactional operations of the architecture used in the application-under-test, rather than database transactions.

5. 5 About Application-Under-Test /1  The application’s architecture similar to Microsoft’s Enterprise Development Reference Architecture (EDRA)  Uses ASP.NET and C# on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 using Oracle 10g database

6. 6 About Application-Under-Test /2  This architecture mainly operates on Request and Response objects communicated through pipelines.  Requests are generated upon user interactions with the interface.

7. 7 About Application-Under-Test /3  Transaction objects process the incoming request  They generate a Response object to send to the UI  Data-access layer classes are created by using an O/R mapping tool

8. 8 The Application Framework

9. 9 DTUT Framework /1  Writing unit tests for each smallest unit was unfeasible due to business constraints.  We take transaction classes as our “test units”.

10. 10 DTUT Framework /2  Writing trivial unit-tests: as simple as inserting a row in the test database.  Transaction-level unit tests:  Achieving high coverage quickly  Intensifying unit tests in critical areas of the system.

11. 11 DTUT Framework /3  Uses reflection to execute all transactions in a generic way.  Test cases added as rows to test database.  Connects to this database and retrieves these rows one by one and executes them.

12. 12 DTUT Framework /4  DTUT have wider coverage than the simplest unit tests, but they still remained more focused than integration-level ones.  Code Generation For Framework  To further speed up the process, a code generation tool is designed and implemented.  The generator produces the test class and creates the test data table in which test cases will added.

13. 13 DTUT Framework Usage and Testing Process /1  Test suite design: The design is made so that it involves positive and negative test cases.  Test class and test-data table generation: The test class(es) for the specified unit and table(s) to hold test data are created using the generator tool.  Forming test cases: Each designed test case is entered in the test-data tables as a row.

14. 14 DTUT Framework Usage and Testing Process /2  Running tests: The tests are run using Visual Studio Team System 2008.  Reporting: Visual Studio reports successful and failed tests visually. Each test can be tracked down to its data rows and the reasons for unexpected results can be found easily. If a defect is discovered, it is entered into the defect- tracking system.

15. 15 Sample metrics (AUT)  Lines of Code : 859,897  Total screens: 780  Total database tables: 820  Methods/Class : 3.2  Average Complexity : 3.05

16. 16 Sample metrics (Testing)  4500 Unit Tests with DTUT:  10 developers x 3 Months For testing a sample entity;  Without DTUT:  18 methods in 560 LoC  With DTUT Framework:  2 methods in 50 LoC  18 rows was created in test database where each row corresponded to a test method.

17. 17 The team’s approach to testing  Project manager  Software project manager  Developers

18. 18 DTUT Framework v2  Why need the second version?  How different is it?

19. 19 DTUT Framework v3  Future work

20. 20 Advantages  DTUT Generation reduces trivial unit test generation time to a simple user-interface selection effort and inserting rows to the test.  This enables rapid creation of unit-tests which is especially important for testing projects that have sizeable amounts of existing untested code.

21. 21 Limitations  DTUT is that its applicable domain covers only projects based on similar frameworks working on.NET architecture, and adhering to certain naming conventions (because of reflection).

22. 22 Conclusion  As with all frameworks, DTUT framework can be useful in its own defined scope and domain. Although it is not a silver bullet, it can facilitate rapid production and standardization of unit tests.