Testing non-commutativity of reduce functions with multi-column inputs

Abstract

With the continuous development of the MapReduce programming model, it is necessary to ensure the reliability of MapReduce programs. In practice, the non-commutativity of Reduce functions seriously affects the reliability of the MapReduce program, which is difficult to debug and even causes errors. Current researches on the non-commutability detection of Reduce function consider the case that the input value is a single attribute. However, such researches ignore the situation where inputs to most reduce functions in practical applications consist of multiple columns (such as a table). To test the commutativity of reduce functions where each input record may contain several input attributes, a new testing method is proposed. This approach uses symbolic execution tools to help generate a few input records, and breaks their data dependencies to generate an original test case t₀, with a dynamic program slicing technique to lessen the scale of t₀. And the ultimate test suite is consisted of different permutations of records in t₀. In the end, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our testing method and that the permutation method Gm is helpful to reduce its complexity.