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Incremental, test-driven development is sweeping the software industry, supplanting more monolithic approaches to software development. Test-driven approaches to software development like Extreme Programming elevate testing from an ancillary activity to an integral part of the programming process. Tests for a program unit are written before the code, driving the design of the program and catching bugs early in its development. These tests form an integral part of the program code base, facilitating program reliability, continual integration, and refactoring.

In our recent experience developing production programs in Java, unit testing has proven effective in assuring the reliability of code with a single thread of control. Open source testing frameworks like JUnit work well in this context. Unfortunately, we have found unit testing is much less effective at assuring the reliabilty of code with multiple threads of control, often simply because the the testing framework silently ignores failures in auxiliary threads. Since thread scheduling is non-deterministic, a unit test can succeed on one run and fail on the next. Moreover, the scheduling characteristics of the test platform can skew test results, hiding synchronization bugs until the program is run on a different platform.

Java libraries and user programs furthermore frequently make assumptions about the threading context in which they execute, but these assumptions are rarely enforced by the actual code and typically only appear in program documentation or white papers, if at all.

To make development of concurrent programs easier, we are developing:

1. Concutest-JUnit: An extension of the JUnit framework, actively supporting the developer by treating tests that could silently ignore failures in auxiliary threads as test errors;
2. Thread Checker: A lightweight annotation language, which can be used to specify and check the threading invariants of both existing and new code;
3. Schedule-Based Execution: A testing framework that can execute unit tests according to a specified set of recorded or generated schedules, elevating the unit testing of concurrent programs to a rigorous, deterministic process.

There is more information available about the components on their respective pages:

• Concutest-JUnit
• Thread Checker
• Schedule-Based Execution

Supplemental material

• Poster (PDF): created for 2006 Corporate Affiliates Meeting at the Computer Science Department of Rice University to summarise our efforts (view embedded).
• Poster (PDF): created for 2005 Corporate Affiliates Meeting at the Computer Science Department of Rice University to summarise our efforts (view embedded).
• Poster (PDF): older version created for 2004 Corporate Affiliates Meeting at the Computer Science Department of Rice University to summarise our efforts (view embedded).
• Poster Abstract (PDF): abstract for 2004 Corporate Affiliates Meeting at the Computer Science Department of Rice University to summarise our efforts (view embedded).
• MS Defense Presentation (PowerPoint): Mathias Ricken's presentation from his Master of Science defense, June 14, 2007.
• MS Thesis (PDF): Mathias Ricken's Master of Science thesis (view embedded)
• Presentation (PowerPoint): Mathias Ricken's presentation for the COMP 600 seminar, August 27, 2007.
• Presentation (PowerPoint): Mathias Ricken's presentation for the Rice Computer Science Club, October 4, 2007.
  • Programming Examples from the presentation.
• Presentation: Java Annotations for Invariant Specification (PowerPoint): Mathias Ricken's presentation for the COMP 617 seminar, September 22, 2008.
• Presentation: Java Annotations for Types, Expressions and Multi-Stage Programming (PowerPoint): Mathias Ricken's presentation for the COMP 617 seminar, October 24, 2008.
• Poster: Invariant Specification and Multi-Staging using Java Annotations (PDF): created for 2008 Corporate Affiliates Meeting at the Computer Science Department of Rice University (view embedded).
• Direct access to the download directory

Concutest is partially funded by the National Science Foundation and the Texas Advanced Technology Program. Copyright © 2004-2008 by Mathias Ricken. All rights reserved.