Topic: System Software Testing........

Message

The levels of software testing include unit, integration, and system testing. Unit testing involves testing individual system modules by themselves, integration testing involves testing the individual modules working together, and system testing involves testing the whole product in its actual or simulated operating environment. This paper focuses on software system testing.

    A software system test is intended to determine whether the software product is ready to ship by observing how the product performs over time while attempting to simulate its real use. System testing is composed of functional, performance, and stress tests. It also covers operational, installation, and usability aspects of the product and may include destructive and concurrence testing. The product may support many different hardware and software configurations which all require testing. All of these aspects are combined to assess the product's overall reliability. Software system testing is usually done when all of the individual software product components are completed and assembled into the final product.

    In the past, system testing environments centered around testing procedural, nondistributed software. These environments, which were also procedural and nondistributed, were usually developed by the test writer on an ad hoc basis along with the test code for the product. Recently, software system testing has benefited from the use of highly automated test harnesses and environments that simplify test execution, results gathering, and report generation (see Fig. 1). Unfortunately, the test harnesses created in these environments were not easily reusable, and when the next project reached the test planning stage, the test harness had to be reworked.

    The advent of standardized test environments such as TET (Test Environment Toolkit)* helped to reduce this costly retooling by providing a standard API (application program interface) and tool base that test developers can adopt and use to write standardized tests. However, the difficulty is to provide a standard test harness that is complete but flexible enough to keep pace with changing software technology and remain viable for the long term.

    During the development and testing of the initial release of HP ORB Plus, which is an object request broker based on the Object Management Group's CORBA specification (see page 76), we realized that distributed object technology posed testing problems that were not adequately solved by any of the test harnesses currently available. We needed a flexible test environment that could handle heterogeneous distributed systems communicating over multiple transports using multithreaded clients and servers. However, we were not willing to lose the investment we made in the test code and tools developed for our earlier products.

    nstead of abandoning the old test environment and replacing it with an entirely new system, we decided to use the object-oriented principles of encapsulation and polymorphism to evolve our current environment base to meet our needs without throwing out the old code. The ability to change or replace functional blocks of a system without affecting the entire environment is one of the main benefits of object-oriented design (see "Object-Oriented Programming" on page 79). Object-oriented principles allowed us to reuse existing tools.

Distributed System Testing

    In a distributed object system, service providers are distributed across a network of systems and are called servers. Clients, who issue requests for those services, are also distributed across a network. A single program can be both a client (issues requests) and a server (services requests). Clients can issue requests to local and remote servers. During a distributed object system test, clients are responsible for reporting any failures or status resulting from the requests they make.

    The first task performed during the system testing of a distributed object software product is test setup. Clients and servers must be deployed across the network to targeted systems. Consideration must also be given to the fact that servers may have multiple clients sending messages to them, and the distribution of clients and servers may change during a system test so that various hardware and software configurations can be tested.

Edited by moderator - 05May2007 at 4:17am

Author	Message
Riya Newbie Joined: 15Feb2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 40	Topic: System Software Testing........ Posted: 16Feb2007 at 4:41pm
	The levels of software testing include unit, integration, and system testing. Unit testing involves testing individual system modules by themselves, integration testing involves testing the individual modules working together, and system testing involves testing the whole product in its actual or simulated operating environment. This paper focuses on software system testing. A software system test is intended to determine whether the software product is ready to ship by observing how the product performs over time while attempting to simulate its real use. System testing is composed of functional, performance, and stress tests. It also covers operational, installation, and usability aspects of the product and may include destructive and concurrence testing. The product may support many different hardware and software configurations which all require testing. All of these aspects are combined to assess the product's overall reliability. Software system testing is usually done when all of the individual software product components are completed and assembled into the final product. In the past, system testing environments centered around testing procedural, nondistributed software. These environments, which were also procedural and nondistributed, were usually developed by the test writer on an ad hoc basis along with the test code for the product. Recently, software system testing has benefited from the use of highly automated test harnesses and environments that simplify test execution, results gathering, and report generation (see Fig. 1). Unfortunately, the test harnesses created in these environments were not easily reusable, and when the next project reached the test planning stage, the test harness had to be reworked. The advent of standardized test environments such as TET (Test Environment Toolkit)* helped to reduce this costly retooling by providing a standard API (application program interface) and tool base that test developers can adopt and use to write standardized tests. However, the difficulty is to provide a standard test harness that is complete but flexible enough to keep pace with changing software technology and remain viable for the long term. During the development and testing of the initial release of HP ORB Plus, which is an object request broker based on the Object Management Group's CORBA specification (see page 76), we realized that distributed object technology posed testing problems that were not adequately solved by any of the test harnesses currently available. We needed a flexible test environment that could handle heterogeneous distributed systems communicating over multiple transports using multithreaded clients and servers. However, we were not willing to lose the investment we made in the test code and tools developed for our earlier products. nstead of abandoning the old test environment and replacing it with an entirely new system, we decided to use the object-oriented principles of encapsulation and polymorphism to evolve our current environment base to meet our needs without throwing out the old code. The ability to change or replace functional blocks of a system without affecting the entire environment is one of the main benefits of object-oriented design (see "Object-Oriented Programming" on page 79). Object-oriented principles allowed us to reuse existing tools. Distributed System Testing In a distributed object system, service providers are distributed across a network of systems and are called servers. Clients, who issue requests for those services, are also distributed across a network. A single program can be both a client (issues requests) and a server (services requests). Clients can issue requests to local and remote servers. During a distributed object system test, clients are responsible for reporting any failures or status resulting from the requests they make. The first task performed during the system testing of a distributed object software product is test setup. Clients and servers must be deployed across the network to targeted systems. Consideration must also be given to the fact that servers may have multiple clients sending messages to them, and the distribution of clients and servers may change during a system test so that various hardware and software configurations can be tested. Edited by moderator - 05May2007 at 4:17am Post Resume: Click here to Upload your Resume & Apply for Jobs

	IP Logged


One Stop Testing Forum : Types Of Software Testing @ OneStopTesting : System Testing @ OneStopTesting