Automated Coverage Tester for the Oracle Archiver of WinCC OA

A large number of control systems at CERN are built with the commercial SCADA tool WinCC OA (formerly PVSS) [1]. They cover projects in the experiments, accelerators and infrastructure. An important component is the Oracle archiver used for long term storage of process data (events) and alarms. The archived data provide feedback to the operators and experts about how the system was behaving at particular moment in the past. In addition a subset of these data is used for offline physics analysis (conditions data). Large volumes of data are produced by the different facilities at CERN (several Terabytes per year). The consistency of the archived data has to be ensured from writing to reading as well as throughout updates of the control systems. The complexity of the archiving subsystem comes from the multiplicity of data types, required performance and other factors such as operating system, environment variables or versions of the different software components. Therefore an automatic tester has been implemented to systematically execute test scenarios under different conditions. The tests are based on scripts which are automatically generated from templates, therefore they can cover a wide range of software contexts. The tester has been fully written in the same software environment as the targeted SCADA system. The current implementation is able to handle over 300 test cases, both for events and alarms. It has enabled to report issues to the provider of WinCC OA. The template mechanism allows sufficient flexibility to adapt the suite of tests to future needs. The developed tools are generic enough