Testing data-centric services using poor quality data: from relational to NoSQL document databases

Businesses are nowadays deploying their services online, reaching out to clients all around the world. Many times deployed as web applications or web services, these business-critical systems typically perform large amounts of database operations; thus, they are dependent on the quality of the data to provide correct service to clients. Research and practice have shown that the quality of the data in an enterprise system gradually decreases overtime, bringing in diverse reliability issues to the applications that are using the data to provide services. These issues range from simple incorrect operations to aborted operations or severe system failures. In this paper, we present an approach to test data-centric services in presence of poor quality data. The approach has been designed to consider relational and NoSQL database nodes used by the system under test and is based on the injection of poor quality data on the database–application interface. The results indicate the effectiveness of the approach in discovering issues, not only at the application-level, but also in the middleware being used, contributing to the development of more reliable services.