Automated testing of healthcare document transformations in the PICASSO interoperability platform

In every application domain, achieving interoperability among heterogenous information systems is a crucial challenge and alliances are formed to standardize data-exchange formats. In the healthcare sector, HL7-V3 provides the current international reference models for clinical and administrative documents. Codices, an Italian company, provides the PICASSO platform that uses HL7-V3 as the pivot format to fast achieve a highly integrated degree of interoperability among health-related applications. Given the XML structure of HL7-V3, PICASSO can exploit the XSLT technology to flexibly transform documents. However, Codices spends a large part of the PICASSO deployment workflow for manually validating the required XSL stylesheets. In this paper, we describe a pilot experience in test automation, based on the TAXI tool that applies systematic black-box techniques to generate a set of XML instances from a schema. Observed benefits to Codices development process are reported and discussed.