KompicsTesting - Unit Testing Event Streams

Abstract

In this paper we present KompicsTesting, a framework for unit testing components in the Kompics component model. Components in Kompics are event-driven entities which communicate asynchronously solely by message passing. Similar to actors in the actor model, they do not share their internal state in message-passing, making them less prone to errors, compared to other models of concurrency using shared state. However, they are neither immune to simpler logical and specification errors nor errors such as dataraces that stem from nondeterminism. As a result, there exists a need for tools that enable rapid and iterative development and testing of message passing components in general, in a manner similar to the xUnit frameworks for functions and modular segments code. These frameworks work in an imperative manner, ill suited for testing message-passing components given that the behavior of such components are encoded in the streams of messages that they send and receive. In this work, we present a theoretical framework for describing and verifying the behavior of message-passing components, independent of the model and framework implementation, in a manner similar to describing a stream of characters using regular expressions. We show how this approach can be used to perform both black box and white box testing of components and illustrate its feasibility through the design and implementation a prototype based on this approach, KompicsTesting.