Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines

—Automated regression test suites are an essential software engineering practice: they provide developers with rapid feedback on the impact of changes to a system’s source code. The inclusion of a test case in an automated test suite requires that the system’s build process can automatically provide all the environmental dependencies of the test. These are external elements necessary for a test to succeed, such as shared libraries, running programs, and so on. For some tests (e.g., a compiler’s), these requirements are simple to meet. However, many kinds of tests, especially at the integration or system level, have complex dependencies that are hard to provide automatically, such as running database servers, administrative privileges, services on external machines or specific network topologies. As such dependencies make tests difficult to script, they are often only performed manually, if at all. This particularly affects testing of distributed systems and system-level softw...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Sander van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra
• Keywords: Environmental Dependencies, ISSRE 2010, Linux Distribution, Software Engineering, Test Suite