Abstract
Implementing test suites for distributed software systems is a complex and time-consuming task due to the number of test cases that need to be considered in order to obtain high coverage. We show how a formal Coloured Petri Net model can be used to automatically generate a suite of test cases for the Paxos distributed consensus protocol. The test cases cover both normal operation of the protocol as well as failure injection. To evaluate our model-based testing approach, we have implemented the Paxos protocol in the Go programming language using the quorum abstractions provided by the Gorums framework. Our experimental evaluation shows that we obtain high code coverage for our Paxos implementation using the automatically generated test cases.
Highlights
Systematic testing is an important activity in software development
As we have illustrated on the Paxos protocol, application of our approach includes constructing a Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) testing model for the system under test, executing simulation-based test case generation algorithms, and applying a test case execution framework which combines test cases obtained from CPN Tools and a test adapter
Our experiments with this testing approach on a single-decree Paxos protocol implemented by the Gorums framework have demonstrated good code coverage and considered both unit and system tests
Summary
Systematic testing is an important activity in software development. This is especially important for fault-tolerant distributed systems, because they are notoriously difficult to implement correctly [1]. The reason for this difficulty is that such systems must cope with both concurrency and failures, e.g. due to crashes and network partitions. Testing approaches and programming abstractions that can be used to systematically test and simplify the implementation of protocols for distributed systems are important. In MBT, we construct a model of the system under test (SUT) and its environment, in order to generate test cases. It involves implementing a test adaptor that can be used to embed the SUT, enabling the test cases to be executed against the SUT, and their output compared against the expected output
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