Research On Contract-Based CORBA Components Software Testing

With the development of software and network technology, plenty of software systems are developed based on the CORBA components technology. The software testing of the CORBA components can guarantee the quality and improve the reliability, so it is a very important section of the developing of such software systems. CORBA, as a distributed component model, has special requirement on the testing method, compared with the traditional software systems.After analyzing the testability of the CORBA components, we put forward a contract-based CORBA components testing method. In this method, CORBA component is descripted by contracts. We test whether the contracts are complied to guarantee the reliability of the component. We also design a contract-base testing architecture of CORBA components.One of the primary sources of the CORBA component defects is the complex mechanism of the CORBA's exception. Such defects are difficult to discover, repeat and debug. The traditional contract concept does not support exception, so we extend it and apply it to the exception mechanism and put forward a method for the testing of CORBA component's exception.We design and implement all the basic functions of the contract-based CORBA component testing architecture. We also analyze how to implement the Testing Analyzer, Exception-Generator and Client Emulator.At last, we introduce how to apply the method in the system "Panorama". Panorama is a protype system of multi-database based on CORBA components. In the system, the ORACLE local database agent is a typical component. we use it as an example to introduce how to test a CORBA component.