Customized Test Data Generator for HL7v3 based Healthcare Information Systems

Abstract

Test effectiveness is a fundamental quality aspect of a test specification, which reflects its ability to demonstrate system quality levels and discover system faults. The effectiveness is tightly linked with the quality of the test data. The paper highlights specific challenges related to testing eHealth applications and emphasizes the difficulties in testing HL7v3 based applications. This paper presents a new approach on generating input test data sets: a highly customizable distance-based test data generator. The paper highlights the importance of having organized structures of test data and shows how the proposed test data generator uses adaptable distances to create clusters of test data. The generator is designed to create test data in a testing language independent format and provide means of conversion to the format used by the target testing language. A general architecture of this generator is presented, and implementation guidelines are proposed. The paper also presents the conclusions drawn from validating the generator in a real scenario.