Toward generic timing tests for distributed multimedia software systems

While multimedia software applications are becoming popular, few studies exist on testing this important class of software, especially with respect to its temporal properties. Traditional software testing techniques mainly deal with functional correctness and cannot be directly applied to testing timing properties. The authors present a framework for testing the generic temporal relations of media objects in distributed multimedia software systems (DMSS). The temporal relations are based on J.F. Allen´s (1983) basic binary temporal relations between two objects and extended to cover multiple number of objects in different streams. We have developed techniques for test case generation and test result analysis based on a distributed tester architecture. A prototype system has been built to test a DEC HPAS multimedia presentation system which is a typical multimedia system supporting W3C´s SMIL standard. A detailed discussion on practical issues and illustration with a number of actual tests are given. Experimental results have shown that our framework is effective in detecting timing errors. The techniques and methodology are general and can be applied to other DMSS with only minor modification.