XML Every-Flavor Testing

With XML and XML Schema widely acknowledged as the de facto standard for data exchange and interoperability between remote applications, the need for checking integrity and adequacy of XML documents, also by means of automated tools, increases. In this perspective, this paper addresses two objectives: we provide a classification and a short overview of the diverse existing approaches for the testing of XML-based documents; then, pushing further the potential of XML for testing purposes, we pursuit the application of traditional testing methods to programs using XML input data. We discuss the use of XML and XML schema as a basis for formalizing and automatizing the testing of applications using such kind of data, with particular reference to recent proposals for specification-based and perturbation-based testing approaches.