CORBA-based test architecture for e-commerce application.

Abstract

E-Commerce systems are specialized instances of distributed processing systems that involve critical financial transactions. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is an industrial standard framework to provide sophisticated infrastructure to develop and deploy distributed objects in an open environment. Using CORBA to facilitate the development and testing of e-commerce system can greatly improve the test effectiveness, and shorten the time-to-market cycle. This thesis proposes a cost-effective generic testing architecture for function and performance testing of e-commerce applications. We relate this architecture to middleware standards such as CORBA. We show how the CORBA framework support testing of e-commerce system for robustness and reliability with the testing architecture which is open, highly distributed, and scalable. We also give a high-yield strategy to testing e-commerce system and demonstrate how our testing architecture supports this strategy. We also provide an assessment of the approach by a small, but realistic case study (Online Currency Exchange) involving design, implementation and function testing in detail. During testing a significant design error was detected. Finally we conclude this thesis by summarizing our results and giving some recommended future work.