Automated functional tests: taking your QA database back to a well known state

Automated functional tests are key to ensure the quality of large applications in incremental development processes. In contrast with unit tests where each test is supposed to be independent from the outside environment, functional tests are really integration tests: in order for them to run properly the process must start from a well known state. The majority of enterprise applications use a relational database in order to store application state. As as one starts to automate the functional tests a problem quickly arises: your automated tests will modify  the QA database and that may have an impact in the future automated test runs. For instance, you write a test for deleting a particular record and it runs fine, but that means in the next run the record won´t be there to be deleted. Of course you can write your automated tests in order to make sure this is not a problem (for example, by ordering your tests so that the record deleted in the delete test is first inserted by a previous test). But that makes the automated tests a lot more difficult to write and run reliably. The ideal solution for this problem (in my oppinion) would be to reset the status of the QA database to a well known state just before starting the automated tests. That´s exactly what I did in a recent customer project using Ant, a little scripting and PostgreSQL: 1 - Create a template QA database This is the database state you want to...

Date: October, 14 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/jjviana/archive/2010/10/14/automated-functional-tests-taking-your-qa-database-back-well-known-s

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