Software Testing Methodologies Dichotomies

Implementation Comments

Transaction Based Systems:

Ø  There is a transaction control block associate with every active transaction that contains information related to transaction type, identify and processing state

Ø  Transactions are usually not passed directly from one process to another but, are transferred from process to process by means of centralized explicit centralized, common, processing queues

Ø  The next process for an active transaction is determined by stored dispatch tables. This task is done by transaction dispatcher

Ø  The key points in transactions life are recorded for different purposes using recovery and other logs

Ø  Self test support: There are special transaction types and states for normal transactions whose only purpose is to facilitate testing

Ø  Transaction Flow Testing does not reveal anything that needs to be worried. Bugs found here can be easily fixed

Hidden Languages:

Ø  The decision in transaction flows are made by a processing module and the dispatcher may direct the flows contained in the transaction control blocks or in databases

Ø  They use certain control codes that actually constitute an internal language

Ø  In such case, all the transaction flows can be implemented as programs in internal language

v  The problem is that these languages are often undeclared, undefined, unrecognized and poorly documented

v  The languages syntax, semantics and processor have not been debugged

v  Even if recognized, self-consistency of the language is not checked

v  The interpreter which is usually be a single routine that processes the language ma have bugs

v  The steps stored in transaction control table may have bugs or may be corrupted

v  Finally, any transaction processing module can have bugs