Modelling and Verifying Combinatorial Interactions to Test Data Intensive Systems Experience with Optimal Archiving at the Norwegian Customs and Excise Directorate

Testing data-intensive systems is paramount to increase our reliance on information processed in e-governance, scientific/medical research, and social networks. Data accrued in these systems often go through several manual and computational steps involving human inputs in interactive media and complex batch applications that aim to ensure high quality of data in terms of validity, correctness, and adherence to business rules. Testing these systems involves verifying data in test databases, copied from different steps of live production streams, for adherence to business rules. We simplify the process by modelling and automatically generating relevant test cases as data interactions satisfying the combinatorial interaction coverage criteria. We verify these test cases using our human-in-the-loop tool, DEPICT. DEPICT, with expert assistance, generates complex SQL queries for test cases and produces a visual report of test case satisfaction. We apply the approach to simplify and optimize a periodic archiving operation within the testing environment of the Custom directorate’s TVINN system.