Task decomposition testing and metrics for concurrent programs

Abstract

Software testing and metrics are two important approaches to assure the reliability and quality of software. The emergence of concurrent programming in recent years introduces new testing problems and difficulties that cannot be solved by testing techniques for traditional sequential programs. One of the difficult tasks is that concurrent programs can have many instances of execution for the same set of input data. Many concurrent program testing methodologies propose to solve controlled execution and determinism. There are few discussions of concurrent software testing from the inter-task viewpoints. Yet, the common characteristics of concurrent programming are explicit identification of the large grain parallel computation units (tasks), and the explicit inter-task communication via rendezvous-style mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on testing concurrent programs through task decomposition. We propose four testing criteria to test a concurrent program. The programmer can choose an appropriate testing strategy depending on the properties of the concurrent program. Associated with the strategies, four equations are provided to measure the complexity of concurrent programs.