conTest

[Thomas Koch <th...@koch.ro>]

Hi,

last weekend I read and very much enjoyed the book "clean code". This great 
book contains two chapters on concurrency and recommends to use a tool from 
IBM "conTest"[2] to test concurrent code.

This tool fiddles with the byte code of classes under test to increase the 
frequency of context switches. Thus conTest tries to make concurrency bugs 
more visible, that would normally occur only after many months of production 
runs.

conTest also can produce a list of classes that are affected by concurrent 
code ("Concurrent coverage").

I ran the ZooKeeper tests on my laptop. While the testsuite did never fail on 
my machine(TM) before, conTest produced three test failures.

Unfortunatly conTest is not (yet) open source, but free of cost available 
after registration.

[1] Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin) 
[2] http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/contest

Best regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro

Re: conTest

[Anthony Urso <an...@cs.ucla.edu>]

There is one called SureLogic that has been licensed to the Hadoop
project somehow,

Check it here:

http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HowToUseConcurrencyAnalysisTools

I have never used any of them, but thought it may be useful.

Cheers,
Anthony

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:41 AM, Thomas Koch <th...@koch.ro> wrote:
> Just FYI,
>
> Thomas Koch:
>> Unfortunatly conTest is not (yet) open source, but free of cost available
>> after registration.
> My question in the contest forum, whether it'd be made available as free
> software sometimes, has been answered negativly. I searched a bit and found
> another set of tools that should help with concurrency testing:
>
> http://concutest.org (forwards to:)
> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~mgricken/research/concutest/
>
> That'll maybe be a task for next year to learn about these tools...
>
> Have a nice day,
>
> Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro
>

Re: conTest

[Thomas Koch <th...@koch.ro>]

Just FYI,

Thomas Koch:
> Unfortunatly conTest is not (yet) open source, but free of cost available
> after registration.
My question in the contest forum, whether it'd be made available as free 
software sometimes, has been answered negativly. I searched a bit and found 
another set of tools that should help with concurrency testing:

http://concutest.org (forwards to:)
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~mgricken/research/concutest/

That'll maybe be a task for next year to learn about these tools...

Have a nice day,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro

Re: conTest

[Patrick Hunt <ph...@apache.org>]

Hey, that's great. Can you enter JIRAs for the issues?

I just got "clean code" in last week, I look forward to reading it.

Patrick

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 11:28 AM, Thomas Koch <th...@koch.ro> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> last weekend I read and very much enjoyed the book "clean code". This great
> book contains two chapters on concurrency and recommends to use a tool from
> IBM "conTest"[2] to test concurrent code.
>
> This tool fiddles with the byte code of classes under test to increase the
> frequency of context switches. Thus conTest tries to make concurrency bugs
> more visible, that would normally occur only after many months of production
> runs.
>
> conTest also can produce a list of classes that are affected by concurrent
> code ("Concurrent coverage").
>
> I ran the ZooKeeper tests on my laptop. While the testsuite did never fail on
> my machine(TM) before, conTest produced three test failures.
>
> Unfortunatly conTest is not (yet) open source, but free of cost available
> after registration.
>
> [1] Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin)
> [2] http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/contest
>
> Best regards,
>
> Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro
>