ConcJUnit: unit testing for concurrent programs

Abstract

In test-driven development, tests are written for each program unit before the code is written, ensuring that the code has a comprehensive unit testing harness. Unfortunately, unit testing is much less effective for concurrent programs than for conventional sequential programs, partly because extant unit testing frameworks provide little help in addressing the challenges of testing concurrent code. In this paper, we present ConcJUnit, an extension of the popular unit testing framework JUnit that simplifies the task of writing tests for concurrent programs by handling uncaught exceptions and failed assertions in all threads, and by detecting child threads that were not forced to terminate before the main thread ends.