Testing concurrent programs is particularly hard, as the interleaving of multiple threads of execution greatly multiples the number of possible code and data access paths. It is quite challenging to write test cases that properly test such scenarios, usually only a handful can be tested.
A unique tool that helps with testing for concurrency bugs is an IBM product named ConTest. ConTest does not generate any new test cases, but if you already have multi-threaded test scenarios, it increases the likelihood of bugs being triggered by introducing random pauses in thread execution.
A while ago, I tried running ConTest against my test suite for SimpleDBM; I found that execution had slowed considerably. So expect your test cases to take much longer to complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment