Testing, reliability, and interoperability issues in the CORBA programming paradigm

Abstract

CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is widely perceived as an emerging platform for distributed systems development. We discuss CORBA's testing, reliability and interoperability issues among multiple program versions implemented by different languages (Java and C++) based on different vendor platforms (Iona Orbix and Visibroker). We engage 19 independent programming teams to develop a set of CORBA programs from the same requirement specifications, and measure the reliability of these programs. We design the required test cases and develop the operational profile of the programs. After running the test, we classify the detected faults and evaluate the reliability of the programs according to the operational profile. We also discuss how to test the CORBA programs based on their specification and interface design language (IDL). We measure the interoperability of these programs by evaluating the difficulty in exchanging the clients and servers between these programs. The measurement we obtained indicates that without a good discipline on the development of CORBA objects, interoperability would be very poor, and reusability of either client or server programs is very doubtful. We further discuss particular incidences where these programs are not interoperable, and describe future required engineering steps to make these programs interoperable, testable, and reliable.