Jata: A language for distributed component testing¹

Distributed component requires test automation more than other components. Test language plays an important role in test automation. This paper proposes a new language, Jata, for testing distributed component in a systematic way by integrating the advantages of Junit and TTCN-3. To test a distributed component, multiple test clients are needed to emulate users to request services from the component under test. Those test clients should be deployed in different machines and can collaborate to finish the testing. A distributed component, as a kind of software component, often has rich data types in its interfaces and the data is usually marshaled to transmit via a network. By inheriting the U2TP (UML2 Testing Profile) concepts, Jata is designed with rich constructs to specify test behavior and test data. By test component, Jata enables the building of distributed test clients; by test case and multi-threading test evaluation, Jata enables the development of any complicated test scenario in flexible way; by test data and its coding and decoding utilities, Jata enables the development of test data in the same way as a programmer does. The script meta-model and system architecture are presented to give a holistic view of Jata. To show the effectiveness of Jata, a banking service testing case study is illustrated.