The topic of a cascade delete came up on a project the other day and I was surprised to find one of the project members wasn’t familiar with the term or the concept. I thought I would share a short lesson and reflect on testing associated with cascade deletes.

A cascade delete is when an on object is deleted in an application and on the backend in a relational database, the delete cascades through the associated tables in the database removing associated data. (And hopefully both removing the appropriate information and leaving the other data.) The concept isn’t difficult to imagine although there are ripples of what takes place, what can go wrong, what could be tested, and how a failed delete can be found.

Through answering a lot of questions on SearchSoftwareQuality.com, I’ve found that terms like integration testing, unit testing, system testing, and acceptance testing often get in the way of talking about testing. There are many of these terms, and they often mean different things to different people.I suspect we use those labels in an attempt to [...]