Language Support For Testing CORBA Based Applications

Abstract

Component Based Development has emerged as economical, reusable, scalable way of developing enterprise as well as embedded software applications. Testing distributed component based systems is difficult when third party components are being used in the development. Many testing methodologies that have been proposed for testing object oriented programs in the literature are being imported into component domain directly or by tuning them. But testing components involves much manual work due to the lack of information of the component. Middleware architectures like, DCOM(Distributed COM), Jini and CORBA(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) are being used in developing the distributed component applications in different vertical domains. In this thesis, a language- Distributed Object Testing Language(DOTL) for specifying the testing process and generation of distributed testing environment for CORBA based applications has been proposed. The language captures required semantics for specifying dummy servers, clients, controlling the testing process, generation of test cases, activating and deactivating objects. Many existing testing techniques can be specified using the semantics provided by the language. Faults occurring in distributed object systems, in addition to the functional errors, can be identifiable using the tool. The language provides abstract types object, argument to specify variables in the testing environment, and operations dealing with these variables to conducts necessary tests. The DOTL has been implemented on MICO(Mico Is CORBA) orb on Linux OS, with mapping of DOTL to CORBA C++.