- Test stubs
In computer science, test stubs are programs which simulate the behaviors of software components (or modules) that are the dependent modules of the module being tested.
Example
Consider a software program which queries a database to obtain the sum price total of all products stored in the database. However, the query is slow and consumes a large number of system resources. This reduces the number of test runs per day. Secondly, the tests need to be conducted on values larger than what is currently in the database.
The method (or call) used to perform this is "get_total()". For testing purposes, the source code in "get_total()" could be temporarily replaced with a simple statement which returned a specific value. This would be a test stub.
There are several testing frameworks available and there is software which can generate test stubs based on existing source code and testing requirements.
ee also
* Software testing
References
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.