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Challenges and Perils of Testing Database Manipulation Code

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Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12751))

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Abstract

Software testing enable development teams to maintain the quality of a software system while it evolves. The database manipulation code requires special attention in this context. However, it is often neglected and suffers from software maintenance problems. In this paper, we investigate the current state-of-the-practice in testing database manipulation code. We first analyse the code of 72 projects mined from Libraries.io to get an impression of the test coverage for database code. We confirm that the database is poorly tested: 46% of the projects did not cover with tests half of their database access methods, and 33% of the projects did not cover the database code at all. To understand the difficulties in testing database code, we analysed 532 questions on StackExchange sites and deduced a taxonomy. We found that developers mostly look for insights on general best practices to test database access code. They also have more technical questions related to DB handling, mocking, parallelisation or framework/tool usage. This investigation lays the basis for future research on improving database code testing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://libraries.io/data.

  2. 2.

    At the time of writing, it has 2.7M unique packages, 33M repositories, and 235M interdependencies between them.

  3. 3.

    https://junit.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://testng.org/.

  5. 5.

    https://mvnrepository.com/open-source/testingframeworks.

  6. 6.

    https://www.jacoco.org.

  7. 7.

    https://bitbucket.org/csnagy/sqlinspect.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/speedment/speedment.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/mybatis/ mybatis-3.

  10. 10.

    http://stackoverflow.com.

  11. 11.

    http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com.

  12. 12.

    http://codereview.stackexchange.com.

  13. 13.

    https://site.mockito.org/.

  14. 14.

    https://easymock.org/.

  15. 15.

    https://github.com/nomemory/mockneat.

  16. 16.

    https://docs.spring.io/spring/ docs/current/spring-frameworkreference/testing.html.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by (a) the F.R.S.-FNRS and FWO-Vlaanderen via the EOS project 30446992 SECO-ASSIST and (b) Flanders Make vzw.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Namur Digital Institute, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium

    Maxime Gobert & Anthony Cleve

  2. Software Institute, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

    Csaba Nagy

  3. Department Computer Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Henrique Rocha & Serge Demeyer

  4. Flanders Make vzw, Lommel, Belgium

    Serge Demeyer

Authors
  1. Maxime Gobert
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  2. Csaba Nagy
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  3. Henrique Rocha
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  4. Serge Demeyer
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  5. Anthony Cleve
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maxime Gobert .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Marcello La Rosa

  2. The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Shazia Sadiq

  3. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Ernest Teniente

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Gobert, M., Nagy, C., Rocha, H., Demeyer, S., Cleve, A. (2021). Challenges and Perils of Testing Database Manipulation Code. In: La Rosa, M., Sadiq, S., Teniente, E. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12751. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79382-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79382-1_14

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79382-1

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