jpb@stl.stc.co.uk (Jonathan Burke) (08/11/89)
Having built an application using INGRES/4GL, we at STL now want to test it thoroughly (of course) and have come up with some ideas on what should be done to ensure we do the tests well. Unfortunately, we have neither the experience ourselves, nor the expertise to hand, to know what are good and not so good ways of testing an INGRES application. This leaves us worried that we may not test sufficiently or that we may do some unnecessary, and time consuming, work as well. To give you a brief idea of what we've done, I'll sumarise. We have an application built round INGRES, using the INGRES ABF facility. The vast majority of the code is written in OSL - we have built over 100 frames in all. The system is menu based and a fair number of our frames perform QBF-type functions, but with a lot of other things happening such as field validations and writing to history entities, and so on. There are also a couple of frames where a lot of processing is performed. The speed of computation is of importance here. To test these, we have done tests to ensure that frames are called in the correct sequence, that the correct forms are displayed, that key presses cause something to happen and so on. We intend now to set up test data and run the processes which affect that data. Exactly what to do here is part of our problem, and also what else should be done. As an example of a problem we face, one particular worry is keeping a consistent database throughout the testing phase. We have thought about having a separate test database for each tester (three or four people will test the system) - but we don't have any idea about the pros and cons of doing this, or indeed of any other ways in which we could proceed. We are not aware of any literature which gives help or advice on how to solve our problems so if anyone out there knows of anything we could read, we'd be most grateful. Also, if you have experience of testing INGRES/4GL applications and are willing to share your experience with us, again this would be most helpful. In fact, any constructive comment you can make will be welcomed. Replies by email would be most helpful and if it's useful, I can summarise responses to the net. Many thanks in advance for any help given. Regards, Jonnie Burke. (jpb@stl.stc.co.uk -- +44 279 29531 Ext 2503)