About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
DSN 2005
Conference paper
Effective testing and debugging techniques for a group communication system
Abstract
View-oriented group communication is an important and widely used building block for constructing highly-available fault-tolerant systems. Unfortunately, group-communication based systems are extremely hard to test and debug due to a number of stateful complex algorithms deployed in parallel and the unique combination of distributed and concurrent programming paradigms that amplifies the non-determinism in the system behavior. In this work, we elaborate on the specific challenges we encountered during the process of testing DCS, a group communication component of the WebSphere (WAS) architecture, as well as on the methodology we have devised and employed in order to cope with these challenges. Our solution relies on a carefully compiled set of invariants that need to be preserved at every execution point and a log analyzer algorithm that performs cross-log verification for all the processes participating in the execution, as well as on of other techniques whose details are described in the paper. © 2005 IEEE.