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AUTOMATED TESTING -- WHY AND HOW by Eugene Volokh, VESOFT Presented at 1990 INTEREX Conference, Boston, MA, USA

Published by INTERACT Magazine, Dec 1990. Everyone knows how important testing is, and, with luck, everyone actually does test the software that they release. But do they really? Can they? Even a simple program often has many different possible behaviors, some of which only take place in rather unusual (and hard to duplicate) circumstances. Even if every possible behavior was tested when the program was first released to the users, what about the second release, or even a "minor" modification? The feature being modified will probably be re-tested, but what about other, seemingly unrelated, features that may have been inadvertently broken by the modification? Will every unusual test case from the first release's testing be remembered, much less retried, for the new release, especially if retrying the test would require a lot of preliminary work (e.g. adding appropriate test records to the database)? This problem arose for us several years ago, when we found that our software was getting so complicated that testing everything before release was a real chore, and a good many bugs (some of them very obvious) were getting out into the field. What's more, I found that I was actually afraid to add new features, concerned that they might break the rest of the software. It was this last problem that really drove home to me the importance of making it possible to quickly and easily test all the features of all our products. AUTOMATED TESTING The principle of automated testing is that there is a program (which could be a job stream) that runs the program being tested, feeding it the proper input, and checking the output against the output that was expected. Once the test suite is written, no human intervention is needed, either to run the program or to look to see if it worked; the test suite does all that, and somehow indicates (say, by a :TELL message and a results file) whether the program's output was as expected. We, for instance, have over two hundred test suites, all of which can be run overnight by executing one job stream submission command; after they run, another command can show which test suites succeeded and which failed. These test suites can help in many ways: * As discussed above, the test suites should always be run before a new version is released, no matter how trivial the modifications to the program. * If the software is internally different for different environments (e.g. MPE/V vs. MPE/XL), but should have the same external behavior, the test suites should be run on both environments. As you're making serious changes to the software, you might want to run the test suites even before the release, since they can

tell you what still needs to be fixed. * If you have the discipline to -- believe it or not -- write the test suite before you've written your program, you can even use the test suite to do the initial testing of your code. After all, you'd have to initially test the code anyway; you might as well use your test suites to do that initial testing as well as all subsequent tests.

Note also that the test suites not only run the program, but set up the proper environment for the program; this might mean filling up a test database, building necessary files, etc. WRITING TEST SUITES Let's switch for a moment to a concrete example -- a date-handling package, something that, unfortunately, many people have had to write on their own, from scratch. Say that one of the routines in your package is DATEADD, which adds a given number of days to a date, and returns the new date. Here's the code that you might write to test it (the dates are represented as YYYYMMDD 32-bit integers): IF DATEADD (19901031, 7) <> 19901107 THEN BEGIN WRITELN ('Error: DATEADD (19901031, 7) <> 19901107'); GOT_ERROR:=TRUE; END; IF DATEADD (19901220, 20) <> 19910109 THEN BEGIN WRITELN ('Error: DATEADD (19901220, 20) <> 19910109'); GOT_ERROR:=TRUE; END; ... As you see, the code calls DATEADD several times, and each time checks the result against the expected result; if the result is incorrect, it prints an error message and sets GOT_ERROR to TRUE. After all the tests are done, the program can check if GOT_ERROR is TRUE, and if it is, say, build a special "got error" file, or write an error record to some special log record. This way, the test suites can be truly automatic -- you can run many test suites in the background, and after they're done, find out if all went well by just checking one file, not looking through many large spool files for error messages. The first thing that you might notice is that the DATEADD test suite can easily grow to be much larger than the DATEADD procedure itself! No doubt about it -- writing test suites is a very expensive proposition. Our test suites for MPEX/3000, SECURITY/3000, and VEAUDIT/3000 take up almost 30,000 lines, not counting supporting files and supporting code in the actual programs; the total source code of our products is less than 100,000 lines. Often, writing a test suite for a feature takes as long or almost as long as actually implementing the feature. Sometimes, instead of being reluctant to add a new feature for fear of breaking something, I am now reluctant to add a new feature because I don't want to bother writing a test suite for it.

Fortunately, the often dramatic costs of writing test suites are recouped not just by the decrease in the number of bugs, but also by the fact that test suites, once written, save a lot of testing time. It's much easier for someone to run an already-written test suite than to execute by hand even a fraction of the tests included in the suite, especially if they require complicated set-up. Since a typical program will actually have to be tested several times before it finally works, the costs of writing a test suite (assuming that it's written at the same time as the code, or even earlier) can be recouped before the program is ever released. Also, test suites tend to have longer lives than code. A program can be dramatically changed -- even re-written in another language -- and, assuming that it was intended to behave the same as before, the test suite will work every bit as well. Once the substantial up-front costs of writing test suites have been paid, the pay-offs can be very substantial. But even though we should be willing to invest time and effort into writing test suites, there's no reason to invest more than we have to. In fact, precisely because test suites at first glance seem like a luxury, and people are thus not very willing to work on them, creating test suites should be as easy as possible. What can we do to make writing test suites simpler and more efficient? One goal that I try to shoot for is to make it as easy as possible to add new test cases, even if this means doing some additional work up front. I try to make every new test case, if possible, to fit on one line. The reason is quite simple: I want to have as little disincentive as possible to add new test cases. A really fine test suite would have tests for many different situations, including as many obscure boundary conditions and exceptions as possible; also, any time a new bug is found, a test should be added to the test suite that would have caught the bug, just in case the bug re-surfaces (a remarkably frequent event). If we grit our teeth and write some convenient testing tools up front, we can make it much easier to create a full test suite. Here, for instance is one example: PROCEDURE TESTDATEADD (DATE, NUMDAYS, EXPECTEDRESULT: INTEGER); BEGIN IF DATEADD (DATE, NUMDAYS) <> EXPECTEDRESULT THEN BEGIN WRITELN ('Error: DATEADD (', DATE, ', ', NUMDAYS, ') <> ', EXPECTEDRESULT); GOT_ERROR:=TRUE; END; END; ... TESTDATEADD (19901031, 10, 19901110); TESTDATEADD (19901220, 20, 19910109); TESTDATEADD (19920301, -2, 19920228); ... By this model, each procedure that you test would have a test

procedure like this one written for it; then the main body of your test program would just be calls to these test procedures. This is especially useful for procedures that require some special processing before or after being called; for instance, they might have reference parameters that need to be put into variables before they're passed, record structure parameters to be filled, multiple by-reference output parameters that all need to be compared against expected values, and so on. You can make up other, even as the following procedure: more general-purpose testing tools, such

PROCEDURE MUSTBE (TAG: stringtype; RESULT, EXPECTEDRESULT: INTEGER); BEGIN IF RESULT<>EXPECTEDRESULT THEN BEGIN WRITELN ('Error: ', TAG, ': ', RESULT, ' <> ', EXPECTEDRESULT); (* error handling code *) END; END; This procedure can be used to check returns an integer value, e.g. the result of any function that

MUSTBE ('DATEADD #1', DATEADD (19901031, 10), 19901110); MUSTBE ('DATEADD #2', DATEADD (19901220, 20), 19910109); MUSTBE ('DATEADD #3', DATEADD (19920301, -2), 19920228); Other, similar, procedures might be written to help test functions that return other types (REALs, STRINGs, etc.). On the other hand, for functions that can't easily be called in one statement (because they take by-reference or specially-formatted parameters), you might want to consider writing a special test procedure. Finally, one other alternative (which I personally prefer) is writing a special "shell" program that asks for a procedure name, its parameters, and the expected result, calls the procedure, and checks the result: PROGRAM TESTSHELL ... ... READLN (PROCNAME, P1, P2, EXPECTEDRESULT); WHILE PROCNAME<>'EXIT' DO BEGIN IF PROCNAME='DATEADD' THEN RESULT:=DATEADD (P1, P2) ELSE IF PROCNAME='DATEDIFF' THEN RESULT:=DATEDIFF (P1, P2) ELSE IF PROCNAME='DATEYEAR' THEN RESULT:=DATEYEAR (P1) ... IF RESULT <> EXPECTEDRESULT THEN ... output error ... READLN (PROCNAME, P1, P2, EXPECTEDRESULT); END; ... This way, your actual test suite could be a job stream, to which you can add as many test cases as you like -- one line per test case --

without having to recompile anything: !JOB TESTDATE, ... !RUN TESTSHEL DATEADD 19901031 10 19901110 DATEADD 19920228 2 19920301 DATEYEAR 19920228 0 1992 ... !EOJ Whenever you make a change to your procedures, you just rerun the TESTDATE job, and you'll either find some bugs or be reasonably confident (though, of course, never 100% confident) that the software works. TESTING PROGRAMS THAT DO I/O It's rather easy to test a procedure whose only inputs are its parameters and whose only output is its result (or even a by-reference parameter). The more places a program derives its input from, or sends its output to, the harder it becomes to test. Let's take a simple I/O program, one which reads a file, reformats it in some way, and writes the result to another file. Obviously, to test it, we should fill up the input file, run the program, and compare the output file against the expected output file. As we discussed in the previous section, it would be nice if we could build a program -- it might be a 3GL or 4GL program, or even an MPE or MPEX command file -that takes as parameters the input data and the expected output data, so that we can easily add new test cases. A first try on this might be a job stream like the following: :PURGE TESTIN :FCOPY FROM;TO=TESTIN;NEW LINE ONE LINE TWO LINE THREE :FILE MYPROGI=TESTIN :PURGE TESTOUT :FILE MYPROGO=TESTOUT :RUN MYPROG :PURGE TESTCOMP :FCOPY FROM;TO=TESTCOMP;NEW PROCESSED LINE A PROCESSED LINE B :SETJCW JCW=0 :CONTINUE :FCOPY FROM=TESTCOMP;TO=TESTOUT;COMPARE=1 :IF JCW<>0 THEN : handle error :ENDIF

or, if the commands are put into a separate command file or UDC, :TESTCMDS LINE ONE LINE TWO LINE THREE :EOD PROCESSED LINE A PROCESSED LINE B :EOD (the data file). would go as input to the :FCOPY commands in the command

Note how the :FILE equations come in handy to redirect the program's input and output files. Not only does this avoid the need to overwrite the production input and output files, but it makes it possible for several test suites which test programs that normally use the same files (e.g. this program, the program that created this program's input file, and the one that reads this one's output file) to run at once. If for some reason your programs don't allow :FILE equations (e.g. they issue their own :FILE equations to refer to these files), try to change them so they do, or at least so they have a special "test" mode that will read :FILE-equatable files. Note also that the job stream regenerates the input and comparison files every time it runs. I recommend this, since then each job stream would be a more or less self-contained unit (if it uses a special command file that no other test job uses, I suggest that you build even this command file inside the test job). It is easier to move or maintain, and is less likely to suffer from "software rot" (a condition that causes software that's been left on the shelf too long to stop working, largely because some outside things that it depends on have changed). Back to our example. One problem with it is that :FCOPY ;COMPARE= is rather finicky about the files it's comparing -- for instance, they must both have exactly the same record size. TESTCOMP, built by an :FCOPY FROM;TO=TESTCOMP would normally have the same record size as the job input device, so you might need a :FILE equation to work around this. A more serious problem is that :FCOPY FROM;TO= can only be easily used for creating files that contain ASCII data. What if some of the columns of the file need to contain binary data? Here is where I think you ought to grit your teeth and write a special program (unless, of course, you have a 4GL that can do this for you). Yes, I know that it seems like a pain to write code that will never be run in production, but is only needed to test other code, but this rather simple program could, if designed right, prove to be a highly reusable building block. The program would first prompt for some sort of "layout" of the file -- a list of the starting column numbers, lengths, and datatypes of each field in the file. Then, it would prompt for each record in the file, specified as a list of fields, separated by, say, commas; it would format the fields into the file record, and write it into the file. Thus, you'd say:

:RUN BLDFILE S,1,8, I,9,2, S,11,10, P,21,8 SMITH, 100, XYZZY, 1234567 JONES, 55, PLUGH, 554927 ...

<< string, integer, string, packed >>

Once you write this program, incidentally, you might find that it has other uses, say, to do manual testing of your program once you've already found that it has a bug and are trying to isolate it. And, of course, if you make it general enough, it should be usable in all of your test suites. Also, your input file had to have been created by some program, and your output file must be intended as to input to some other program; there's nothing that says that you can't run those programs in the test job to create the input file from data you've input and then format the output file into readable text. The problems come in if the other programs are too hard to run in batch (e.g. require block mode), or if you'd like to be able to test each program separately from the others, perhaps because you want to see how your program reacts to illegal data in its input file, data that shouldn't normally appear in the input generated by the other program. What if your programs reads and writes an IMAGE database? This is in some ways simpler to test and in other ways more difficult. You can use QUERY to fill the input sets and create output (using >LIST or >REPORT) will be usable by :FCOPY ;COMPARE=. Be sure, though, that you sort any master sets that you dump using >REPORT -- since the order of the entries in the master set depends on the hashing algorithm, which depends on the capacity, unsorted output will make the test suite find an "error" every time you change the capacity. However, the setup of the IMAGE database might also be a bit more cumbersome, largely since you probably want to have your own special test database built by the job (for the reasons discussed above -independence from the production data, from other test suites' data, and self-containedness). You might want to create a simple program or command file that takes a schema file, lowers the dataset capacities on it, runs DBSCHEMA, and then does a DBUTIL,CREATE -- you'll find that a lot of your test suites can use it. ADJUSTING FOR ENVIRONMENT INFORMATION Our pass-input-and-compare-output-against-expected-result strategy works just fine if the same input is always supposed to yield the same output, but what if the output can vary? The most common variables are based on current date and time -- reports that contain this information in headers, output files that have each value date-stamped, a date-handling procedure that returns today's day-of-week, and so on. Another related problem is with programs that check whether they're being run online or in batch, and do different things in these cases -- how can your batch test suite make sure that the online features work properly? What we really have here is a different sort of input, input not from

a file or a database, but from the system clock or the WHO intrinsic. There are a few ways of handling this; for example, instead of doing an FCOPY ;COMPARE=, which demands exact matches, you can have your own comparison program that lets you specify that some particular field -e.g., the date on a report header -- will not get compared. Even better, your comparison program can let you specify that a particular field should be equal to, say, the current year, month, or day, calculated at the time the comparison program runs. However, more flexible still -- and necessary for things like pretending you're online rather than in batch -- you can try to redirect this "input" from the environment, just as you redirected input from files and databases using :FILE equations. Now how are you going to do this redirection? Believe it or not, after having the gall to ask you to write test suites that are as long as your source code, I'm suggesting that you change your programs to accommodate testing requirements. Instead of calling CALENDAR or DATELINE, for instance -- or using whatever language construct may give you this information -- you might write your own procedure: FUNCTION MYCALENDAR: SHORTINT; BEGIN get the value of the "PRETENDCALENDAR" jcw; IF the value is 0 THEN MYCALENDAR:=CALENDAR ELSE MYCALENDAR:=value of jcw; END; This way, your program would normally get the current date from the CALENDAR intrinsic, but when the PRETENDCALENDAR JCW is non-zero, will use that value instead. You might, for efficiency's sake, want to get the JCW value only once, and then save it somewhere; for ease of use, you might want to look at the PRETENDYEAR, PRETENDMONTH, and PRETENDDAY JCWs, and assemble the CALENDAR-format value from them (possibly using the date-handling package that we so thoroughly tested a few pages ago). A similar procedure might be written to determine whether the program is running online or in batch -- it'll check the PRETENDONLINE JCW, and if it doesn't exist, or set to some default value, will call the WHO intrinsic. If your program does different things depending on the user's capabilities or logon id, you might want to have similar procedures for them, too (wrapped around the WHO intrinsic call) -although it's possible for your test suite to actually be several jobs, each of which logs on under a different user, with different capabilities, it may be more convenient for you if one job can make itself look like each one of these users in turn. In fact, it might even be convenient for your own manual debugging (say, when you want to duplicate the program's behavior as a particular user id, or on a particular date, but don't want to re-logon or change the system clock). Of course, the drawback to this approach is that you're not actually testing the program as it really behaves, but rather as it behaves with the testing flag set; the code you're executing in testing mode

is somewhat different than is normally executed, and if, say, there's a bug in the CALENDAR call or the WHO call, your test suite won't catch it, since in testing mode the intrinsics aren't called at all. Unfortunately, this seems to be a necessary evil; the only solution is to minimize the amount of code whose execution depends on whether or not you're in testing mode. One thing that you might do -- if you want to be really fancy -- is create a library of procedures called CALENDAR, CLOCK, WHO, etc., which would, depending on some testing flag, either call the real CALENDAR, CLOCK, or WHO, or return "pretend" values; you can then put these procedures into an RL, SL, or XL, and not have to change your source file. Once you debug your library procedures, you should have more confidence that your testing in test mode actually simulates what the program will really behave like in production. One thing that you may have to do, however, is intercept not just the intrinsics that you call directly, but also whatever procedures might be called by language constructs (like COBOL's facility for returning today's date). WHAT TEST CASES SHOULD YOU USE? So far, we've talked a lot about how to write tools that make it easy for you to add test cases to your test suites, but not much about what your test cases should be. Say that you're testing a DATEADD procedure, one that returns a date that is X days after date Y. (Let's assume that X could be negative -- X = -5 means a date that is 5 days before date Y.) What test cases should you use? Think about this before reading the answers! Well, it seems to me that there are quite a few: * Add days so that it stays in the same month (e.g. 1990/05/10+7). * Add days so that it changes months (e.g. 1990/05/10+30). * Add days so that it changes years (e.g. 1990/05/10+300). * * * Add days so that it changes months or years over February 28th in a non-leap year (e.g. 1990/02/10+30). Add days so that it changes months or years over February 29th in a non-leap year (e.g. 1992/02/10+30). Handle years that are divisible by 100 but not by 400 (like 1900 or 2100), which are not leap years (did you know this?).

* Add 0 days. * Add days so that it goes outside of your accepted date range (e.g. beyond 1999, or whatever other date is your limit). * Add to an invalid date -- one with an invalid year, month, or day. * All the above, but with subtracting days.

Wow! That's a lot of work. But, you'll have to admit, all the above are things that you really should test for (unless they're not relevant to your particular interpretation, e.g. if your date range doesn't extend to 1900 or 2100, or if you've consciously decided not to check for certain error conditions), manually if not automatically; it's especially important to test for "boundary conditions" (did you know that, in the DATELINE intrinsic, the next day after DEC 31, 1999 is JAN 1, 19:0?), for cases that require special handling (like leap year), and for proper handling of errors. These are the obvious tests -- tests for bugs that you expect might happen. As other bugs come up, however, you ought to add test cases that would have caught these bugs: firstly, you'll have to test your fix anyway, and if you add the test case before implementing it, it won't cost you anything extra; secondly, the same bug (or a similar one) may come up later, but this time will get caught. Still, there's no need to get extreme about things; shortcuts are still possible. Say, for instance, that DATEADD works by converting the date into a "century date" format (number of days since a particular base date), adding the number of days, and then converting back into a year/month/day format -- if you're sure that this is all it does, you might just have one test case (preferably one that seems to exercise as much of the internal logic as possible, such as one that changes months and years). Of course, you'd still have to properly test the date conversion routines. In general, what you test should depend on how your code works. Whenever you know your code treats two different types of input differently, you should test both. If you're fairly certain that a single test will test many features, you can just use that one test; if, for instance, you know that testing one module or routine will also adequately test the module or routines that it calls, you can make do with just testing the top-level one. However, try to resist this temptation; firstly, the top-level module probably doesn't exercise all the functions of the bottom-level one, and secondly, it's very convenient to have a test suite for the bottom-level module -that way, if you're making substantial changes to your system and you know the top-level module is broken, you can still test the bottom-level one independently. Finally, an obvious point, but one that it often neglected -- it's better to test a little than not at all. If you find something that's hard to test in all possible ways, test it in at least a few; if, for instance, its results are hard to automatically verify, at least make sure that they're in the right format, or even that they're returned at all (i.e. that the program doesn't just abort). There's really no 90-10 rule in testing -- 10% of the effort won't get you much more than 10% of the benefit -- but you can at least avoid some of the more obvious (and more embarrassing) bugs. Then, once the groundwork is laid, you might try to get back to it periodically, adding a new test case here or there. Don't let perfectionism get in the way of doing at least something. VERIFYING DATA STRUCTURES

Most sufficiently complicated data structures -- anything from your data stored in an IMAGE database to your own linked lists, hash files, or B-trees, if you write such things yourself -- have internal consistency requirements. Certain fields in your databases may only contain particular values; other fields must have corresponding records in other datasets or in other databases. If any of these internal consistency requirements are not met, you know you have a bug somewhere. You can get a lot of benefit out of writing a verification routine for each such data structure that checks it for internal consistency. This is somewhat different from the test suites we discussed before, which check for the validity of the ultimate results, but it can still be very useful, since internal inconsistency must have, by definition, been caused by a program error, and is likely to eventually lead to incorrect results (incorrect results that your test suites might not otherwise check for). You should call this verification routine at the end of each test suite to verify the consistency of the structures (again, usually data in the database) that the program being tested built; you might even run it after each step in the test suite, to isolate exactly where an error might be sneaking in. You may also want to run the verification routine against your production database every night, to check your programs as they run in the real world, not just the controlled test environment; and, you can run it whenever you suspect that something may be wrong (either in testing or in production), to figure out if an internal inconsistency might be causing it. The verification routine shouldn't be hard to write; if you can do it using a 4GL or some other tool (like Robelle's fast SUPRTOOL -- speed is important, since you want to make it as quick and easy as possible to verify your data), all the better. Simply put, check all the fields for which at least one possible value would be invalid, whether it is because it's not one of a list of allowable values for this field, or because it's out of range, or because it's inconsistent with some other values in this record, or some other values in the dataset/database. Possible checks include: * Flag fields may contain only certain allowable values. * Numbers, like salaries or prices, must be within certain ranges (e.g. non-negative, below a certain amount, etc.).

* Dates must be valid (valid year, month, day). * Strings must at least not include non-alphanumeric characters. * Some fields must have corresponding entries in a different dataset or database (do a DBGET mode 7, for instance, to make sure they're there). Some fields are calculated from other fields, and must match (e.g. a total price field in an invoice that must be the sum of the price fields in the line items). only can this check for bugs in your programs, but can also check

Not

for invalid production data that your programs might not have detected (e.g. garbage characters in string fields, bad states, state codes that don't match phone numbers, etc.). And, again, if written as a QUERY >XEQ file, or as a 4GL program, it can be very easily created, and used over and over again. TESTING COMMAND-DRIVEN AND CHARACTER-MODE INTERACTIVE PROGRAMS As we discussed before, the key to successful automated testing is to have the proper tools that make adding test cases easy. One in particular -- which takes some work to construct but can make writing test suites much simpler -- is very much worth discussing. This test-bench lets you run another program under its control, with the son program's $STDIN and $STDLIST redirected to message files. The test-bench can let you specify input to be passed to the son program, and the expected output that the son program should display; for instance, a typical test suite might look like: :RUN TESTBENC RUN SONPROG I CALC 10+20 O 30 DOIT I SQUARES 3 O 1 O 4 O 9 DOIT ... << << << << << << << << << command to start son process >> command for son to execute >> expected result >> tells test-bench to compare the results >> command for son to execute >> expected result >> expected result >> expected result >> tells test-bench to compare the results >>

What are the advantages of this approach? * It lets you specify the expected output right after the input; this makes the test suite much easier to write (and read and maintain) than if you had to specify all the input up front and all the expected output (from all the commands) at the end. It lets you compare the output and the expected output much more flexibly than a simple :FCOPY ;COMPARE= would; you can specify special commands that indicate, say, that the output needn't be exactly as you specified, but might include some variations here and there (e.g. date- or environment-dependent information). It tells you exactly which commands got errors, rather than just telling you an error was found.

Note, however, that all this test-bench does is feed input into the son process' $STDIN and read output from its $STDLIST; what about other output, say output to files, databases, JCWs, or MPE/XL variables, and input from the same places? Fortunately, output to one of those places can easily be converted into output to $STDLIST simply by executing an MPE command, like :PRINT (or :FCOPY on MPE/V), :SHOWJCW, :RUN QUERY, etc. If our program

can not only check the output of the son process and feed input to a son process, but execute MPE commands and check their output and feed them input, our problems will be solved. Let's say your program is supposed to build a file, and you want to make sure that the file is built with the right structure and the right contents. Then, your test suite might look like this: :RUN TESTBENC RUN SONPROG I BUILDFILE XXX O File was built. DOIT MPE :LISTF XXX,2 O ... O XXX 123 32W ... O ... DOIT MPE :PRINT XXX O ... DOIT << command to start son process >> << command to test >> << expected output to $STDLIST >> << MPE command to execute >> << expected :LISTF output >> << MPE command to execute >> << expected :PRINT xxx output >>

How does this program work? Well, as we said before, it runs the son program with $STDIN and $STDLIST redirected to message files; "I" commands write stuff to the input message file, "O" commands write the expected output records to a special temporary file, and "DOIT" commands read the output message file and compare it against the O-command temporary file. One problem is how "DOIT" will recognize that the son program is done with its output and has issued another input prompt. If the son program always uses the same prompt (or one of a few prompts), DOIT can check for this; if, however, the son program's prompt isn't easily distinguishable from normal output, you should make the son program print a special line (e.g. "***INPUT***") before doing any input when it's in "testing mode"; so long as this happens before any input, DOIT can recognize these lines and realize that the output is done. What about the MPE commands that can be used to "convert" output to files, databases, etc. into output to $STDLIST? When we test MPEX (the test-bench I'm describing is essentially the one that we use to test all of our software), this is no problem, since we can just pass MPEX an MPE command as input, and MPEX will execute it. You might do the same yourself -- make sure that the program you're testing executes MPE commands -- or you can have TESTBENC have two son processes, one the program being tested, and the other a simple program that prompts for an MPE command and executes it. The only other problem that you'll face here is executing :FCOPY or :RUN commands on MPE/V (where they can't be done with the COMMAND intrinsic); however, if you're an MPEX customer, you can actually use MPEX as this MPE-command-executing son process -- MPEX can execute :FCOPYs, :PRINTs, :RUNs, etc. This test-bench $STDIN-and-$STDLIST-redirection solution, it seems to me, would work quite well for any command-driven or interactive character-mode programs. If you want to use it to test procedures, you'll have to write a simple shell program that prompts for input

parameters, calls the procedure, and prints the output parameters, and run this program as a son of the test-bench. Testing block-mode programs, I suspect, would be much more difficult; I'll have a few words about it later, but it's still an unsolved problem as far as I'm concerned. Of course, the more complicated your test-bench is, the more important it is to write a test suite for it! (A bug in the test-bench that keeps it from properly checking things could be almost unnoticeable, since it will falsely tell you that your test suite ran fine.) We test our test-bench by feeding a lot of test commands, some of which are calculated to produce errors and others to succeed, and check the results of these operation (not using the test-bench itself, of course) to see if they're as expected. AUTOMATIC TEST SUITE GENERATION No matter how sophisticated your test-bench, you'll still have to write your test cases. For simple one-line-input, one-line-output operations, there's little that you need to do beyond specifying the input and the expected output; however, for things that require a lot of set-up, or are actually conversations, with many output prompts and many inputs, you'd like a better way. One idea that some automated testing people like is having you run the program once, specifying all the right inputs, and making sure that all the outputs are correct; these inputs and outputs will then be saved, ready to be "re-played" by the test-bench, which will resubmit exactly the same inputs, and expect to get exactly the same outputs. In effect, then, the test suite will check that all subsequent executions of the program behave exactly the same way as the initial one (which was presumably correct). The way you'd do this is by modifying the test-bench program we discussed above (what? you mean to say you haven't written it yet?) to have a special "data-collection" mode that will accept user inputs, pass them to the program, collect the outputs, and create a file that can later be used by the normal mode of the test-bench. Now, there are a few problems with this, which lead me to conclude that, even if this data-collect feature is used, the test suite that it generates must be easy to modify. Firstly, the user will doubtless make errors while entering the original inputs; since the data-collect feature doesn't know what's a user error and what should be part of the test suite, there needs to be some way of editing out these errors. (Technically, you need not do this, since exactly the same inputs should yield exactly the same error outputs in the future, but if you don't edit them out, the test suite will be very unreadable and unmaintainable.) Secondly, the future output probably won't exactly match the current output -- dates and other environment information (version numbers, etc.) will doubtless change. There needs to be some way to edit the generated test suite to replace the expected output with some sort of "wildcard" characters that tell the test-bench that any output would be acceptable in this case. However, taking into account that some editing will be needed, a data-collect feature can be quite convenient for testing features that

involve complicated I/O sequences. A SAMPLE TEST ENVIRONMENT Besides having the right test tools and the right test suites, it's important to internally set up your test suites and your test environment so that it is as easy as possible to run all your tests and check whether or not they succeeded. Here are a few tips that we've found handy ourselves: * Have one test suite for each major feature, not one big one for your entire system. When you're working on a particular feature and want to see if it works, you'll probably want to re-run only that test suite after each change, and re-run all the test suites only at the very end.

* As we mentioned before, have each test suite as self-contained as possible, but also try to have each test case within each test suite be relatively self-contained. The more a test case depends on the results of the test cases that preceded it, the harder it will be for you to fully understand what the state of your internal files, databases, etc. is at the time the test case is executed, and the harder it will be to maintain it, or even understand why the "expected results" you have for it in your test suite are really what should be expected. Of course, some test cases must not be self-contained precisely because you want to make sure that they work properly when done together, rather than separately. * Have each test suite run in its own group, with all the files needed by the program being tested redirected to the files in that group. The first thing that the test suite should do is purge the group (if it's logged on to it, this will merely purge all the files); this way, you'll be sure that this test run is not influenced by previous runs of the same test suite, and since the test suite runs in its own group, it will not be influenced by concurrently-running other test suites. All the actual test suites and permanent support files should be in their own group, separate from the groups in which the test suites run; this way, the test suites will be able to purge their own groups, as discussed above. If the test suite files are all in a particular fileset (e.g. "T@.TEST"), they can be submitted in MPEX using a %REPEAT/%STREAM/%FORFILES construct. Each test suite should signal that it completed successfully by building a file called TESTOK, and that it failed by building a file called TESTERR (or, even better, TESTE###, where ### stands for the number of errors discovered). Then, a :LISTF TESTERR.@.TESTACCT,6 will show you which jobs had errors in them. In case you're afraid that a job might abort without building either a TESTOK or TESTERR file, you can build the TESTERR file at the very beginning and only purge it at the end if all went well. Finally, if you use a test-bench program, the test-bench should

send all its output, especially an indication of all the errors (what the input was, what the output was, and what the expected output was), to a disc file called, say, TESTLOG, which can easily be read, and will remain on the system even if the spool file is deleted. Thus, the configuration we use in VESOFT is: C@.TEST.VESOFTD -- command files used by the test suites. M@.TEST.VESOFTD -- MPEX test suites. S@.TEST.VESOFTD -- SECURITY test suites. A@.TEST.VESOFTD -- VEAUDIT test suites. TESTPROD.TEST.VESOFTD -- a command file that account and %STREAMs M@.TEST+S@.TEST+A@.TEST. @.MALTFILE.VETEST -MALTFILE.TEST.VESOFTD. group used by purges the VETEST test suite

@.MBATCH.VETEST -- group used by test suite MBATCH.TEST.VESOFTD. ... TESTING SEEMINGLY HARD-TO-TEST PROGRAMS Some things are easier to test than others; procedure calls are simplest, command-driven programs are rather straightforward, "conversational" character-mode programs are a bit harder. Much depends on how easy it is to feed the program input and intercept the program's output; for example, if a program does input from tape, you might redirect it by a :FILE equation to a disc file, but how will you test the code in the program that tries to handle tape errors? If a program is supposed to submit a job, how can you tell whether the job was properly submitted? There are several general tricks that you can use to solve these problems, though these are more examples of ingenious solutions for you to emulate, not specific instructions that should always be followed: * Inputs: Have ways to "fake" hard-to-trigger input conditions, like bad tapes, control-Y, I/O errors, etc. For instance, have a "***BAD TAPE***" record in a file be interpreted by the program as a tape error; if the program expects a tape to contain several things separated by EOF markers (which can't normally be emulated by disc files), have it treat an "***EOF***" as an EOF marker. Again, this has the same problem as the PRETENDDATE/PRETENDONLINE features that we suggested above -- what you'll really be testing is not the actual execution of the program, but the execution of the program in testing mode. However, though problems with, say, the actual condition code check that detects the tape error will not be found, all the other aspects of tape error handling will

be properly tested. * Outputs: Find commands or programs that can convert an output that is hard to test for into one that is easy to test for; for instance, if your program is supposed to do a :DOWN, test it by doing a :SHOWDEV afterwards to see if it is DOWNed or has a DOWN pending. If the program is supposed to do an :ABORTJOB, PAUSE for some time (since an :ABORTJOB may not immediately take effect) and then do a :SHOWJOB of that job number to make sure that the job no longer exists. If your program is supposed to shut down the system, you're out of luck... More outputs: But maybe you're not out of luck in the system shut-down case, after all; analogously to the "fake input" suggestion above, you might have your program check to see if it's in testing mode, and if it is, print a message instead of shutting down the system (or doing something equally uncheckable-for). Again, this won't make sure that the ultimate operation is done properly (since it won't be done in this case at all), but at least it'll make sure that all of the preliminaries will be handled correctly. General: Find ways of taking care of timing windows; for instance, if your program submits a job, a simple :SHOWJOB in the test suite won't be a proper check (since a small job might have finished by the time the :SHOWJOB is done), and having the job build a file or leave some such permanent file won't work either, since the job might still not have started up. Instead, your test suite might build an empty message file and then make sure that the job writes a record to this message file (possibly by setting up a logon UDC for that user). Your test suite can then read the message file, waiting until a record is written to it, no matter when the job actually gets around to executing. Message files are also quite useful when the test suite has to check something at a particular point in the son program's execution, and if it checks it too early or too late the results will not be quite right. This is particularly so when your code is supposed to properly handle concurrent access in a non-standard way (i.e. not by simply using FLOCK/FUNLOCK or DBLOCK/DBUNLOCK). You might want to have your programs, when run in testing mode, try to read records from message file at critical points, which will let you control when each program will hit a particular piece of code. Again, these are some sample solutions to some (though by no means all) testing problems. The $65,536 question of testing, however, still remains: How do you test VPLUS block-mode applications? Some of the above tricks might be usable -- instead of calling the VPLUS intrinsics, call procedures that, in testing mode, will do normal, unformatted terminal I/O (i.e. the input fields are to be input simply as a data string, with all the fields run together), which can then be run under test-bench control. Unfortunately, it seems that this would leave too much out of the testing (for instance, the correctness of the VPLUS calls themselves, and the correctness of any edits specified in the VPLUS forms), and the test suites would also be quite unreadable and unwritable. Someone might do something to intercept the

terminal I/O from within VPLUS complicated for me. Any ideas? CONCLUSION To sum up, a few testing maxims: * * * Automate output. testing -both

itself,

but

that's

getting

too

the

input and the

checking of the

Write test suites before or while you're writing the program -that way, you can use them to do even the initial testing. Figure out the testing tools that you need and don't skimp in building them; they can save you a lot of effort.

* Make it as easy as possible to add new test cases (try to make it one test case per line), even if it means extra work up front. * * Have your test cases be in job streams, not in source files, so that you can add new ones without recompiling. Change your programs so that they can "pretend" that today's date, the batch/online flag, your logon information, and such, are something other than what they really are. Do the same for hard-to-reproduce conditions, like I/O errors, control-Y, etc. Think about your code and come up with test cases that exercise as much of it as possible; as new bugs arise, add test cases that would have caught them. Write verification routines for all your complicated data structures, especially including the data in your files and databases. If feasible, write some sort of test-bench program in which you can test the behavior of other programs by feeding them input and checking their output.

* Think creatively about testing features that at first glance seem difficult to check the results of. Use message files to control timing problems. * Be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort (and therefore money) on automated testing, but expect to save a lot more effort, and come out with much fewer bugs, if you do it right.

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