The Design of an Automated Test Code Generation System for SQL Stored Procedures

This paper presents an overview of the design and implementation of a framework for automated test code generation of SQL stored procedures in a .NET managed code environment, using SQL, XML and the C# programming language. The primary knowledge and coding skills required for developing and using the framework are SQL, XML, and C#. The framework is most useful in a software development scenario where dedicated software test engineers are employed for testing activities, and these test engineers have SQL and XML knowledge but not necessarily strong C# coding ability. An advantage of the framework compared to some alternative approaches is that because the framework uses SQL metadata, access to the source code of the stored procedures under test is not required. After initial development, most of the testing update effort consists of editing a relatively simple XML file.