Tool support for testing concurrent Java components

Author

Long, Brad ; Hoffman, Daniel ; Strooper, Paul

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. Technol. & Electr. Eng., Univ. of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld., Australia

Volume

29

Issue

6

fYear

2003

fDate

6/1/2003 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

555

Lastpage

566

Abstract

Concurrent programs are hard to test due to the inherent nondeterminism. This paper presents a method and tool support for testing concurrent Java components. Tool support is offered through ConAn (Concurrency Analyser), a tool for generating drivers for unit testing Java classes that are used in a multithreaded context. To obtain adequate controllability over the interactions between Java threads, the generated driver contains threads that are synchronized by a clock. The driver automatically executes the calls in the test sequence in the prescribed order and compares the outputs against the expected outputs specified in the test sequence. The method and tool are illustrated in detail on an asymmetric producer-consumer monitor. Their application to testing over 20 concurrent components, a number of which are sourced from industry and were found to contain faults, is presented and discussed.

Keywords

Java; concurrency control; multi-threading; object-oriented programming; program testing; software tools; ConAn tool; Concurrency Analyser; Java classes; asymmetric producer-consumer monitor; clock; concurrent Java component testing; concurrent programs; drivers; faults; multithreaded context; nondeterminism; synchronization; test sequence; tool support; unit testing; Automatic testing; Clocks; Concurrent computing; Java; Monitoring; Sequential analysis; Software testing; Synchronization; System testing; Yarn;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSE.2003.1205182

Filename

1205182