This blog is a place to meet our experts. We share technical knowhow and lessons learned from software projects, and discuss clever solutions for real-world problems.
This part explains some of the sophisticated software technology that is working behind the scenes in our rule-based test-data generator for form-centric applications. You will see that a simple enumeration of all possible ways to fill in a form is likely doomed to run longer than the age of the universe. Therefore more efficient techniques are needed to make the seemingly impossible possible.
This part addresses the question what makes test data valuable for functional tests. You will understand the important concept of extreme and special values, and how to obtain test data that is highly compressed and also attains a high test coverage. The article also explains our novel idea for constructing a generator for such high-quality test data.
A lot of our web applications contain a large number of forms with hundreds of fields and complex cross-field constraints. mgm’s quality assurance team uses rule bases and automatic form validation to verify the correctness of these apps. This blog series discusses the challenges in generating test data for this verification and explains our automated process for producing masses of test data by utilizing the rule bases.
In this second installment, we conclude our evaluation of XForms implementations and explain why we ultimately preferred the Orbeon engine. I walk you through a XForms sample to explain essential concepts. My team has spent quite a lot of time understanding the Orbeon architecture and I discuss our findings, including separate-deployment configuration and state handling.
Reinhard Nägele,
12.5.2010 |
1 Comment 
Warp Persist is a persistence integration library for Google Guice. It comes with built-in support for Hibernate, JPA, and db4o. Warp Persist proved to be lightweight and unobstrusive. Especially useful in our case was its runtime support for multiple databases, besides other features, such as declarative transactions or dynamic finders.
mgm develops several large scale web applications containing hundreds of forms, e.g. the e-government portal ElsterOnline Portal. Design, implementation, test, and maintenance of these forms implies significant effort. We are currently evaluating different technologies – including XForms, Wicket and JSF (ICEfaces) – that could help us to reduce these efforts, to improve quality and set the framework for our next generation web forms-centric applications.
