Testing distributed real-time systems

Abstract

For testing of sequential software it is usually sufficient to provide the same input (and program state) in order to reproduce the output. For real-time systems (RTS), on the other hand, we need also to control, or observe, the timing and order of the inputs. If the system additionally is multitasking, we also need to take timing and the concurrency of the executing tasks into account.In this paper we present a method for deterministic testing of multitasking RTS, which allows explorative investigations of real-time system behavior. The method includes an analysis technique that given a set of tasks and a schedule derives all execution orderings that can occur during run-time. These orderings correspond to the possible inter-leavings of the executing tasks. The method also includes a testing strategy that using the derived execution orderings can achieve deterministic, and even reproducible, testing of RTS. Since, each execution ordering can be regarded as a sequential program, it becomes possible to use techniques for testing of sequential software in testing multitasking real-time system software. We also show how this analysis and testing strategy can be extended to encompass distributed computations, communication latencies and the effects of global clock synchronization. The number of execution orderings is an objective measure of the testability of a system since it indicates how many behaviors the system can exhibit during runtime. In the pursuit of finding errors we must thus cover all these execution orderings. The fewer the orderings the better the testability.