JPA based test support
Bozóki Szilárd
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BME
Ferencz Endre
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BME
Goldschmidt Balázs Dr
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BME
Budai Péter
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BME
While contemporary complex information technology systems satisfy a wide variety of user needs, they also have numerous interdependencies due to the vast number of integration possibilities. Owing to this, both the conventional and agile software development methodologies have a strong emphasis on testing. The majority of the on-line content generating server side applications is built over relational databases. However, the available tools which are capable of testing an object-relationship mapping based applications are insufficient.
The data available during development and testing might greatly differ from real ones. From security and privacy point of view the usage of real data is especially solicitous. By adequate planning it is possible to create a data structure which covers most of the use cases. The filling of data fields is just a smaller part of the data generation, because it is more difficult to handle the complex object relations, which could significantly alter behavior.
We provide a platform independent solution to the problem based on the Java Persistence API, which is the standard object-relationship mapping of the Java environment. Our solution generates sample data from Java entity classes with appropriate relationships, which cover most standard and exceptional cases. In our solution we put great emphasis on the quality of the generated data, so a high level of customization is supported.
Our tool greatly helps the effective creation quality products by being usable in most parts of the software development process, as it is deployable from the earliest development phase.