Testing of the rapidly developed prototypes

A conflict occurs between rapid prototyping and the adequate testing of these prototypes. The author shows how much of the software testing process could be automated to produce faster and better quality prototypes. The application for which the automated testing tools were developed is a prototyped negotiation support system (NSS). The system´s primary function is to assist in the negotiation of the networking services offered by Bellcore Client Companies (BCCs) to their customers. The Negotiation is preceded by an initialization process (called an NSS Maintenance), which creates a customer-specific Data Base (DB). The System for Performance Testing of NSS (SPT) was developed to automate NSS testing. SPT´s major function is to simulate the NSS execution of several different classes of negotiation scenarios. The SPT system has been in use for almost six months, and the preliminary estimates show that testing productivity has significantly improved. In the remainder of this paper, the methodology used to build SPT as a general automated testing tool is described