posted 03-30-2001 04:41 AM
A test harness usually runs your test cases.
It is perhaps a "shell" into which you can easily insert more test cases.For example, when testing the database layer of a client-server system once, we built a test harness. It was a simple executable, along with an automated test tool script which could:
- accept the database calls to be executed
- execute the calls
- retrieve the database response
- compare the actual response against the expected response
- log the results accordingly
After that it was just a matter of inserting the new test cases and expected results into the array that the test harness used.
We ended up using the one test harness along with thousands of test cases to make a pretty effective test suite.
It allowed us to test the database layer in isolation from the rest of the system. We didn't need to depend on the GUI or client code, or anything else to be working.
We could easily create a subset of all the test cases if needed, or execute them in a loop for extended testing.
-joe
posted 03-29-2001 10:41 PM
