Test Control via DOS Middleware Instrumentation

One of the important issues in testing distributed applications is to provide automated control of the non-determinism by guarding the inter-process communications, forcing the execution along the expected path when necessary, in the presence of multiple execution choices. As distributed object system middlewares are now widely recognized and adopted, it is desirable to build up the distributed test architecture with an instrumental layer in the middlewares to gain the control over the inter-process communications. Adding this layer transparently from the existing middleware implementations is enabled by some special interfaces provided by the middlewares for interception services. Here we discuss the design issues on developing such an instrumental layer in distributed object system middlewares as part of our testing environment for distributed applications