The Measured Performance of Database Aware Test Coverage Monitoring

Dr. Gregory Kapfhammer (CS/Allegheny College)

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
12 pm - SENSQ 5317

Free pizza and refreshments will be provided to attendees starting at 11:45 am

Hosted by Panos Chrysanthis

Abstract

Unlike traditional programs, a database application interacts with a database that has a complex state and structure.  Even though the database is an important component of modern software, there are few tools to support the testing of database applications.  This presentation describes a test coverage monitoring technique that tracks a program's definition and use of database entities during test suite execution.  We conducted experiments to measure the costs that are associated with (i) instrumenting the program and the tests  and (ii) monitoring coverage.  For all of the applications, the experiments demonstrate that the instrumentation mechanism incurs an acceptable time overhead.  While the use of statically introduced  probes may noticeably increase the size of an application, the experiments reveal that this approach successfully controls coverage monitoring time. Varying the granularity at which we record the database-aware coverage causes an increase in testing time that ranges from 13% to no more than 54%.

Biography of Speaker

Dr. Gregory M. Kapfhammer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Allegheny College. Kapfhammer's research interests include software engineering, software testing and analysis, and data management. The paper "A Family of Test Adequacy Criteria for Database-Driven Applications", co-authored by Kapfhammer and Dr. Mary Lou Soffa, was selected to receive the ACM SIGSOFT  Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE 2003.  Kapfhammer earned the  PhD and MS from the University of Pittsburgh and the BS from  Allegheny College, all in computer science.  More information about  Kapfhammer's research and teaching is available at:  http://cs.allegheny.edu/~gkapfham/.