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Test Coordination and Dynamic Test Oracles for Testing Concurrent Systems

Authors:
Bernard Stepien
Liam Peyton

Keywords: software testing; concurrent systems; TTCN-3; test oracles; race conditions.

Abstract:
Testing concurrent systems is complex. In traditional software unit testing, a test sequence is always composed of a stimulus and its corresponding fully predictable response. With concurrent systems, this simple model no longer holds as the state of the System Under Test (SUT) changes while several users place their requests. Race conditions are a particularly challenging problem for testing, since they will occur and must be identified, but are very disruptive to the test environment. In this paper, a case study, using the formal test specification language TTCN-3, illustrates the challenges for test coordination, especially race conditions, and propose techniques to address them. We also introduce shared variables and the use of semaphores in the TTCN-3 parallel test component model as a mechanism to implement dynamic test oracles.

Pages: 22 to 27

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: February 23, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8394

ISBN: 978-1-61208-776-4

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 23, 2020 to February 27, 2020