QA and Testing: a DeltaXML solution

The flexibility of XML opens up new opportunities for your colleagues in Development – but it also presents new challenges in monitoring quality levels and ensuring consistent results. DeltaXML provides solutions to common problems of managing QA and Testing when working with XML.

Consider a typical regression testing problem: the latest build of the system uses an updated XML library which produces results in a different format – how do you find real changes when you're given two 10 Mb files which look entirely different? Using DeltaXML, you can test whether output from the new build has really changed from the baseline, or whether it is just formatted differently, with different namespace prefixes and reordered attributes. As the structure of your files becomes more complex, so the severity of the problem increases – and so does the usefulness of the DeltaXML solution.

• Simplify Regression Testing – find real changes in a morass of syntactic detail, ignoring syntax differences, ignoring white space changes, comparing orderless data and even identifying changes to XML Schemas. For more details see our pages on regression testing and displaying changes.
• Improve Code Auditing – track and manage change to XSL code and to XML test data. See auditing changes to XML for more information on these techniques.
• Automate XML Configuration Management – since all changes to your XML are expressed in XML, updates can be checked and metrics applied. See our pages on versioning XML for more ways of using XML delta files.

As an option with the DeltaXML API there is an XML-driven auto-test framework, the DeltaXML Test Framework (DTF), which is built upon JUnit and allows you to drive regression tests out-of-the-box using DeltaXML with XML script files and Apache Ant.  Our DeltaBlade add-on, which builds upon Apache Jelly, provides a more powerful solution to testing needs for those with extensive regression testing requirements.