A proposed Agent Based Framework for Testing Data-Centric Applications

Software testing is indispensable for all software development. As all mature engineering disciplines need to have systematic testing methodologies, software testing is a very important subject of software engineering. Database systems have important and wide popularity among the world. It is common for software applications written in an imperative language to have access to the database through SQL statements embedded in the code. Testing of such can be manual, automated, or a combination of both. Agent technologies facilitate the automated software testing by virtue of their high level decomposition, independency and parallel activation.

This paper, proposes a framework for testing a Database, through automated testing using multi-agents which will ensure that testing time is not wasted and aids in better decision-making for the Test Managers. We have proposed an effective automated test framework using multi-agents that manages testing of database applications thereby reducing the various resource attributes such as people, cost, time during the test process. This framework also ensures quality in the testing process by reducing the manual work.

We have measured the effectiveness of the test process for the framework through various metrics that enhances the quality of the process. We have implemented the test process for six different database applications and their effectiveness computed through metrics.