State-based reproducible testing for CORBA applications

Abstract

Reproducible testing approaches have been developed for traditional concurrent programs for over a decade to provide a deterministic way of testing, but those approaches are generally based on the control structure of the program. However in recently revitalized component based software development, state-based testing is more important than control structure based testing because such components are usually implemented using the object-oriented paradigm. We propose a dynamic state-based reproducible testing approach for a component software that each component can change the system state nondeterministically during the concurrent execution in a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) environment. We use a replay controller for a given state sequence from a statechart-like model of each component. The replay controller is designed to force the order of the program's execution based on the given state sequence. Unlike the static state analysis of a program, our approach dynamically executes the actual program components under the control of the replay controller for a selected state sequence. With this state-based reproducible testing approach, testers can detect state behavioral errors of a component software dynamically and deterministically.