Software Quality achieved through Coverage Metrics in Database Testing

Code coverage is often defined as a measure of the degree to which the source code of aprogram has been tested. Various metrics for measuring code coverage exist.The number of defects isan important measure of software quality which is widely used in industry. Software test coverage toolscan easily and accurately measure the extent to which the software has been exercised .Both testingtime and test coverage can be used as measures to model the defect finding process. However testcoverage is a more direct measure of test effectiveness and can be expected to correlate better with thenumber of defects found.In majority of software applications,Database systems play an important role. In literature there is good amount of work done in testing database applications [3, 5, and 6]. The levelsof quality, maintainability, testability,and stability of software can be improved by performing measuresof the testing process and calculating its metrics. In most of the applications coverage metrics playsa major role in predicting the quality of the software.The accuracy of database testing is improved bycalculating the coverage percentage of the frequently used SELECT statements.This paper proposes twoalgorithms for measuring coverage of the SQL queries. An analysis of the two algorithms also performedas to which metric is better so that it would help the test manager to take effective decisions.Our work inthis paper details on importance of coverage metrics required to achieve quality of a database applicationand presents the various coverage metrics that are used for achieving the testing efficiency of a databaseapplication. We have considered six different database applications and calculated the various coveragemetrics thereby achieving quality and efficiency in testing