DOS Middleware Instrumentation for Ensuring Reproducibility of Testing Procedures

One of the important issues in testing distributed applications is to provide automated control of the nondeterminism by guarding the interprocess communications (IPC) in the presence of multiple execution choices, so that we can force the execution along the expected path and make the testing reproducible. As distributed object system (DOS) middlewares are now widely recognized and adopted, it is desirable to build up the distributed test architecture with an instrumental layer in the middlewares to gain the control over the IPC. Adding this layer transparently from the existing middleware implementations is enabled by some special interfaces provided by the middlewares for interception services. Here, we discuss the design issues on developing such an instrumental layer in DOS middlewares as part of our testing environment for reproducible testing of distributed applications