Title :
Effective testing and debugging techniques for a group communication system
Author :
Farchi, Eitan ; Kliot, Gabi ; Krasny, Yoel ; Krits, Alex ; Vitenberg, Roman
Author_Institution :
HRL, IBM, Haifa, Israel
fDate :
28 June-1 July 2005
Abstract :
View-oriented group communication is an important and widely used building block for constructing highly-available fault-tolerant systems. Unfortunately, group-communication based systems are extremely hard to test and debug due to a number of stateful complex algorithms deployed in parallel and the unique combination of distributed and concurrent programming paradigms that amplifies the non-determinism in the system behavior. In this work, we elaborate on the specific challenges we encountered during the process of testing DCS, a group communication component of the WebSphere (WAS) architecture, as well as on the methodology we have devised and employed in order to cope with these challenges. Our solution relies on a carefully compiled set of invariants that need to be preserved at every execution point and a log analyzer algorithm that performs cross-log verification for all the processes participating in the execution, as well as on of other techniques whose details are described in the paper.
Keywords :
Java; fault tolerant computing; groupware; program debugging; program testing; DCS; WAS architecture; WebSphere architecture; concurrent programming; cross-log verification; distributed programming; fault-tolerant system; group communication component testing; log analyzer algorithm; program debugging; program testing; view-oriented group communication system; Application software; Automatic testing; Debugging; Distributed control; Fault tolerant systems; Performance analysis; Runtime; System recovery; System testing; Timing;
Conference_Titel :
Dependable Systems and Networks, 2005. DSN 2005. Proceedings. International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2282-3
DOI :
10.1109/DSN.2005.41