Testing
Automated Testing of Oracle Code
At Ellebaek Consulting we work closely with our clients helping them to test custom Oracle code in the form of PL/SQL/Java stored procedures and views, which provides the following benefits:
- Cost reduction: Defects are discovered as early in the project lifecycle as possible, which reduces cost.
- Risk reduction: The risk of deploying the software to production is reduced as the number of defects expected to be found is lower than it would have been without the unit testing.
- Software quality improvement: The code quality is improved through early defect discovery.
- Improved confidence, trust and teamwork: As the quality of the code is improved so will the confidence, trust and teamwork amongst all stakeholders in the project.
- Ease of refactoring and enhancements: You can safely refactor the existing code -- eg in preparation for future enhancements or for improved performance -- as the unit tests will expose any change in external behavior. The unit tests form an important safety net for new team members that are giving responsibilities of refactoring or enhancing existing Oracle code.
- Improved system documentation: The unit tests form a type of documentation to team members and maintenance programmers as they express expected behavior under different circumstances.
- Decreased risk of hacker attacks: Automated unit tests will highlight if the Oracle code no longer behaves as expected when deploying an Oracle or Operating System patch, which enables you to safely deploy Oracle's quarterly security patches and any OS-related patches, safeguarding against hacker attacks.
360 Degrees
We also provide other aspects of testing Oracle code with Quest Code Tester for Oracle (QCTO), including:
- Training: Detailed and practical training with QCTO for PL/SQL developers -- a 2 day intensive training course. Read more here.
- Assistance and inspiration to the Test Managers and Testers that analyze and design the following, where each step adds more details and builds on the previous step:
- Test policy: High-level approach towards testing.
- Test strategy: Rules for testing in more detail, identifying where the optimal Return On Investment can be obtained. Potentially project-specific.
- Test approach: Implementation details of the test policy and strategy for a particular project.
- Test amount: Establishment of code coverage requirements identified through product risk analysis.
- Test design: Low-level design of the test cases, driven by all of the above.
- Coaching on best practices and specific challenges and issues:
- On-site coaching.
- Off-site coaching via e-mail, phone, Skype and remote desktop sharing (eg TeamViewer or WebEx).
- Technical Testing: Supplementing your available resources with technical testing of Oracle code, such as automated testing of:
- PL/SQL stored procedures at various levels, eg unit and integration.
- Java stored procedures at various levels, eg unit and integration.
- Oracle views.
- Batch jobs internal/external to the Oracle database.
- Refactoring code for improved testability.
- Test data setup.
- Mocking (a technique used for breaking inter-dependencies in legacy code).
- Commercial extensions (planned availability spring 2012):
- Test data setup: An XML-based framework useful for creating/removing required test data.
- Mock objects: A system allowing you to easily create and use mock objects (stand-in code acting on behalf of the original code), enabling you to test PL/SQL code with many dependencies, one unit at a time.
- Automated test case creation for a perfectly working existing program: Execution of the PL/SQL program, recording of its behavior in terms of parameters, return values and exceptions, and creation of corresponding test cases.
- Fine-grained difference reporting: Reports that show you detailed differences between program output and expected outcome.
- Blogging: Sharing a Toad World blog with Steven Feuerstein on Quest Code Tester for Oracle: Real Automated Code Testing for Oracle.
Quest Code Tester for Oracle Headstart
You can obtain the above through Ellebaek Consulting's QCTO Headstart package, which consists of a customized configuration with the following potential elements:
- 2 day training (cost determined by number of delegates).
- 2 days of identification of how and where to best start using QCTO on your project(s).
- Voucher for 12 days of on-site coaching, valid for 6 months.
- Off-site coaching, paid by the hour.
- QCTO extensions (cost determined by number of licenses).
Technologies
We implement all of the above in close collaboration with each client, using the following technologies:
- Oracle PL/SQL and SQL
- Java
- XML
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- C++
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