Chengkai Li
Christoph Csallner
ABSTRACT
A database application differs form regular applications in that some of its inputs may be database queries. The program will execute the queries on a database and may use any result values in its subsequent program logic. This means that a user-supplied query may determine the values that the application will use in subsequent branching conditions. At the same time, a new database application is often required to work well on a body of existing data stored in some large database. For systematic testing of database applications, recent techniques replace the existing database with carefully crafted mock databases. Mock databases return values that will trigger as many execution paths in the application as possible and thereby maximize overall code coverage of the database application.
In this paper we offer an alternative approach to database application testing. Our goal is to support software engineers in focusing testing on the existing body of data the application is required to work well on. For that, we propose to side-step mock database generation and instead generate queries for the existing database. Our key insight is that we can use the information collected during previous program executions to systematically generate new queries that will maximize the coverage of the application under test, while guaranteeing that the generated test cases focus on the existing data.
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Index Terms
- Dynamic symbolic database application testing
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