Uma abordagem para o desenvolvimento de testes de sistema automáticos de aplicações distribuídas.

Abstract

The testing activity is being increasingly used to ensure that the software product meets customer specifications. System tests are those that aim at testing the whole application, fully integrated and running on an environment very similar to the one the application will be subjected when in production. Automating such tests is a very desirable requirement because automation can drastically reduce the testing execution costs. Howeveri producing automated testing is often infeasible due to lack of tools that give developers the ability to configure, deploy and run the software under test as desired. By considering tit? context of distributed applications, the testing activity, whether manual or automatic, becomes considerably difficult due to distributed applications features such as concurrency and parallelism. This thesis presents an approach for developing automated system tests for distributed applications. The aim of this approach is to allow the programmer to write automated system tests for distributed applications using the same programming language and environment used to implement the application under test. In order to study the proposed approach we developed a prototype called SysTest. We carried out a usability evaluation of SysTest aiming at showing feasibility of our testing approach to the development of system tests for real distributed applications. The results provide evidence that the SysTest API allows the writing of automated tests for distributed applications and is easy to be used by the programmers that have developed the system under test.