Testing Database Transactions

Speaker:          Yuetang Deng   
                  Polytechnic University
                  USA   

Title:            Testing Database Transactions

Date:             Monday, 15 March 2004 

Time:             2:30pm - 3:30pm 

Venure:           Room 2404   
                  (Phase I, via lift nos. 17/18)   


ABSTRACT: 

Database systems play an important role in nearly every modern organization, 
yet relatively little research effort has focused on how to test them. In 
testing such applications, the states of the database before and after 
execution play an important role, along with the user's input and system 
output. This talk describes AGENDA , a research prototype tool set for 
testing DB application programs, with emphasis on AGENDA's techniques for 
checking test results. AGENDA components populate the database, generate 
inputs, and check aspects of the correctness of output and new DB state. 
Two levels of checks are used to check both database state and state 
transition. The transition check validates the state transition performed 
by the transaction. The state check validates that the overall global 
consistency properties hold for the new database state. We then discuss 
extensions to AGENDA for testing Web database applications. New testing 
techniques that handle the unique features of these systems are needed. 
Application source code is analyzed to extract relevant information.  A 
graph is constructed in which nodes represent URLs and edges represent 
links between URLs. A set of paths through the graph is selected and test 
cases are generated for each path and then automatically executed. The 
current implementation is targeted toward web applications written as Java
Servlets and uses an algorithm based on cyclomatic complexity to generate 
paths. Empirical evaluation based on the standard benchmarks is presented.


BIOGRAPHY: 

Yuetang Deng received his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Peking 
University. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Polytechnic 
University and Jinan University. Since September 1998, he has been working 
towards his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Polytechnic University.
His research interests are in the areas of software engineering and security, 
database systems, and web technology.