Software testing and metrics for concurrent computation through task decomposition

Abstract

Software testing is an important approach to assure the reliability and quality of software. Sequential programming testing is a fairly sophisticated process and concurrent programming has emerged in the past few years. Some concurrent program testing methodologies are proposed to solve controlled execution and determinism. However, there are few discussions of concurrent software testing from the inter-task viewpoint. The paper focuses the testing view on concurrent programming through task decomposition. Four testing criteria are proposed to test a concurrent program. The programmer can choose an appropriate testing strategy depending on the properties of concurrent programs. A coverage criteria hierarchy is provided. Moreover, two suggestions for concurrent programming based on rendezvous complexity are made.