TESSY -- An Overall Unit Testing Tool
Joachim Wegener, Roman Pitschinetz · 1995
Until now, a lot of computer-aided software testing tools have been developed. Most of them aim at the special support of several distinct test activities like test execution, monitoring, and test evaluation. Tools which cover a wider range of activities and test phases have the decisive shortcoming that there is no methodological support for the systematic design of test cases, particularly for the functional test. In summary, there is no sufficient overall support for all test activities. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the testing tool TESSY was developed. The most im-portant strength of TESSY is that it provides support for the whole testing life cycle, with the main emphasis on computer-aided test case determination, test data selection, expected results prediction, test execution, and test evaluation. Furthermore, there is powerful support for test organization and test documentation. An integral part of TESSY is the classification-tree edi-tor CTE, a graphical editor for the descriptive and systematic design of black-box test cases following the classification-tree method. Several other substantial components of TESSY are, for example, special window-based editors for the provision of essential environment informa-tion, for the graphical visualization of the test object’s interface as well as for the interactive input of test data and expected results. During test execution, several basic activities, such as test drivergeneration, coverage analysis, and regression testing, are performed automatically. For the test evaluation, different criteria can be defined for the comparison of actual and ex-pected results. Practical trials of the test system started in 1994. First promising results indicate that the test efficiency is enhanced significantly by using TESSY. Future work will focus on extensions of TESSY with respect to integration testing and automatic generation of test cases and test data. 21.