DCO Analyzer: Local Controllability and Observability Analysis and Enforcement of Distributed Test Scenarios
This work addresses the challenge of automated integration testing for distributed systems, offering a solution to improve responsiveness and fault detection without extensive coordination, though it is incremental as it builds on existing UML sequence diagram specifications.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring interoperability and correct behavior in heterogeneous distributed systems by introducing DCO Analyzer, a tool that checks and enforces local controllability and observability in distributed test scenarios, automatically determining the minimum number of coordination messages needed.
To ensure interoperability and the correct behavior of heterogeneous distributed systems in key scenarios, it is important to conduct automated integration tests, based on distributed test components (called local testers) that are deployed close to the system components to simulate inputs from the environment and monitor the interactions with the environment and other system components. We say that a distributed test scenario is locally controllable and locally observable if test inputs can be decided locally and conformance errors can be detected locally by the local testers, without the need for exchanging coordination messages between the test components during test execution (which may reduce the responsiveness and fault detection capability of the test harness). DCO Analyzer is the first tool that checks if distributed test scenarios specified by means of UML sequence diagrams exhibit those properties, and automatically determines a minimum number of coordination messages to enforce them.