Model Driven Testing of Time Sensitive Distributed Systems
This work addresses the challenge of integrating model-based development into agile methods for distributed systems, though it appears incremental as it applies existing functional programming and testing techniques to this domain.
The paper tackles the problem of testing time-sensitive distributed systems by modeling their structure and behavior, mapping these models to a lightweight execution engine using a functional programming language, and systematically defining and executing tests within the same technology. The result is a demonstration of how composition and state machine models for distributed asynchronously communicating systems can be easily mapped to a lazy functional language, enabling the treatment of distributed timing aspects and underspecification.
In this paper we demonstrate an approach to model structure and behavior of distributed systems, to map those models to a lightweight execution engine by using a functional programming language and to systematically define and execute tests for these models within the same technology. This is a prerequisite for a smooth integration of model based development into an agile method. The novelty of this paper is the demonstration, how composition and state machine models for distributed asynchronously communicating systems can easily be mapped to a lazy functional language and then using standard testing techniques to define test on those programs. In particular distributed timing aspects and underspecification can be treated accordingly within a functional language, using a certain style of functions.