K. F. Donnelly
Abstract
As the demand for increasingly complex software systems grows, and our software development environments become increasingly sophisticated in response, our testing technology must keep pace. This paper describes the evolution of one software testing environment and the genesis of its logical successor.pastel (PICS Automated System Testing Environment for Leap) originated over a decade ago, with an interpreter for a simple testing language used on a single project by a group of about ten people. As the demands of testing very large systems grew, pastel's functionality expanded. Today's pastel includes facilities for creating a test by simply exercising the system under test, for running the test in a variety of modes, and for capturing and automatically analyzing test results. pastel allows application experts to create tests easily; no sophisticated programming skill is required. pastel is now used by projects throughout the Software Technology and Systems Area of Bell Communications Research.pastel is a relatively mature product, an adequate testing system for the monolithic database systems it was intended to exercise. astra, its successor, is now being designed to test systems of interacting systems built on different sizes and flavors of hardware. This paper reviews the evolution of pastel and the preliminary design work and unifying concepts underlying astra.
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Index Terms
- A case study in test environment evolution
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