Software testing and metrics for concurrent computation

Abstract

Verification and validation are two important technologies to assure the reliability and quality of software. Software testing and metrics are two approaches to execute the verification and validation. In sequential computation, a fairly mature process exists, with various methodologies and tools available for use in building and demonstrating the correctness of a program being tested. The emergence of concurrent computation in recent years, however, introduces new testing problems and difficulties that cannot be solved by the traditional sequential program testing techniques. Many concurrent program testing methodologies have been proposed to solve controlled execution and determinism. There have been few discussions of concurrent software testing from the inter-task viewpoint, even though the common characteristics of concurrent programming are the explicit identification of the large-grain parallel computation units (tasks) and the explicit inter-task communication via a rendezvous-style mechanism. In this paper, we focus on testing concurrent programs through task decomposition. We propose four testing criteria to test a concurrent program. A programmer can choose an appropriate testing strategy depending on the properties of the concurrent programs. Associated with the strategies, four equations are provided to measure the complexity of concurrent programs.