CORBA-based e-commerce application testing architecture

E-commerce systems are specialized instances of distributed processing systems. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) provides a sophisticated infrastructure to develop and deploy distributed objects. As systems become more complex and geographically distributed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct cost-effective, systematic and comprehensive testing on such systems. Using CORBA to facilitate the development and testing of e-commerce systems can greatly improve testability and directly shorten the time-to-market cycle by decreasing the test effort. This paper proposes a practical CORBA-based approach called CDATA (e-Commerce Development And Testing Approach), which supports both functional and performance testing of multiple distributed CUTs (components under test). The approach is illustrated by the implementation of an experimental e-commerce system and the corresponding testing architecture