Design-Model-Based Test Data Generation for Database Applications

This research focuses on testing enterprise systems, more concretely on how to automatically generate the initial test data to be entered into the relational database to support each test case. Existing approaches cannot generate initial database entries to suit complicated business logic states such as reading the database more than once, searching the database by partial string matching, or setting primary and foreign key constraints on the database scheme. To solve these limitations, we propose a method for initial database generation. This method adopts a design model that can handle the complicated business logic states given above, and from this design model, our method generates appropriate initial database entries, it employs a step-by-step approach using the constraints extracted from the design model. The proposed method enables us to automatically generate initial database entries for a wide range of test cases and thus supports the testing of industrial-level enterprise systems. Using three industrial-level enterprise systems as case studies, we confirm that our method properly generated initial databases for 72% to 100% of the test cases in which an initial database was needed.