A temporal approach for testing distributed systems

This paper deals with testing distributed software systems. In the past, two important problems have been determined for executing tests using a distributed test architecture: controllability and observability problems. A coordinated test method has subsequently been proposed to solve these two problems. In the present article: 1) we show that controllability and observability are indeed resolved if and only if the test system respects timing constraints, even when the system under test is non-real-time; 2) we determine these timing constraints; 3) we determine other timing constraints which optimize the duration of test execution; 4) we show that the communication medium used by the test system does not necessarily have to be FIFO; and 5) we show that the centralized test method can be considered just as a particular case of the proposed coordinated test method.