A Partial Test Oracle for XML Query Testing

A partial test oracle is proposed to verify the actual outputs in access testing on XML data. The considered software under test is a query program which receives as input an XML document obtained from an XML repository of any kind, and produces XML data as output. To deal with the actual outputs from this testing process, the partial oracle evaluates the correctness of the test executions according to: (1) a loose specification provided by the tester, and (2) a set of predefined constraints that describe invariant properties of the expected outputs. By means of the loose specification, the oracle can particularize the constraints to the concrete behaviour of the query program to test. This approach enables the oracle to give automatically a response about the correctness of the program under test with a certain precision at feasible cost. To illustrate the usefulness of the approach a case study is presented.