Testing Oracle: Strategies For Success

The following is an excerpt of the paper draft and the set of slides that made my presentation during the December 2007, last quarter of 2007, NYOUG meeting at St. John University.

ABSTRACT

This study focuses in the relating of 18 years of Oracle experience and it discusses many relevant scenarios to successfully approach Oracle testing based on the workload/workflow characterization, involving forms, reports, SQL, PL/SQL, and object-orientated programming languages among others. Independently from the methodology used, the paper will also challenge opinion discrepancies among approaches such as CMM/CMMI and XP models, and traditional, object-oriented, and iterative software engineering methodologies. Both the hypothetical and theoretical framework will approach best practices in testing Oracle front-end, back-end and middleware development at any stages. Finally, cases discussing strategies to both front-end, middleware, and back-end testing with an assessment as to whether a successful or failed outcome was related to the methodology utilized and will attempt to identify critical stages for possible point of failures or supporting robustness and reliability.

Introduction

For over eighteen years I have been a database specialist, with practice in various areas such as software engineer, DBA, database analyst, and database architects, among of other functional and technical roles. In every scenario, however, I have had a significant amount of quality assurance duties. Sometimes, as consultant or associate, telling the truth about a particular aspect of a database environment could not only be hard to explain to coworkers or colleagues but also could hit the sensitivity of some business relationships, even when a current collaboration-driven approach is in place. Therefore, the objective of this paper is primarily to attain an understanding of the importance and the reasons and concerns of why quality assurance is mission critical in every stage of any software engineering model or paradigm. Other important objectives are emphasizing the workflow characterization in order to accomplish better QA control; discuss areas of current and future applications to achieve process improvement; and correlate both the conceptual and practical frameworks involved. Finally, another important objective is to introduce Oracle11g Real Application Testing (RAT) from the perspective of quality assurance and business process control.