Database-aware test coverage monitoring

Unlike traditional programs, a database-centric application interacts with a database that has a complex state and structure. Even though the database is an important component of modern software, there are few tools to support the testing of database-centric applications. This paper presents a test coverage monitoring technique that tracks a program’s definition and use of database entities during test suite execution. The paper also describes instrumentation probes that construct a coverage tree that records how the program and the tests cover the database. We conducted experiments to measure the costs that are associated with (i) instrumenting the program and the tests and (ii) monitoring coverage. For all of the applications, the experiments demonstrate that the instrumentation mechanism incurs an acceptable time overhead. While the use of statically inserted probes may increase the size of an application, this approach enables database-aware coverage monitoring that increases testing time from 13% to no more than 54%.