• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.37-58
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• 2011

In general, testing DB applications is much more difficult than testing other types of software. The fact that the DB states as much as the input data influence and determine the procedures and results of program testing is one of the decisive reasons for the difficulties. In order to create and maintain proper DB states for testing, it not only takes a lot of time and efforts, but also requires extensive IT expertise and business knowledge. Despite the difficulties, there are not enough research and tools for the needed help. This article reports the result of research on automatic creation and maintenance of DB states for testing DB applications. As its core, this investigation develops an automation tool which collects relevant information from a variety of sources such as log, schema, tables and messages, combines collected information intelligently, and creates pre- and post-Images of database tables proper for application tests. The proposed procedures and tool are expected to be greatly helpful for overcoming inefficiencies and difficulties in not just unit and integration tests but including regression tests. Practically, the tool and procedures proposed in this research allows developers to improve their productivity by reducing time and effort required for creating and maintaining appropriate DB sates, and enhances the quality of DB applications since they are conducive to a wider variety of test cases and support regression tests. Academically, this research deepens our understanding and introduces new approach to testing enterprise systems by analyzing patterns of SQL usages and defining a grammar to express and process the patterns.