Testing Parallel and Distributed Programs with Temporal Logic Specifications

This paper presents a new approach for testing parallel and distributed programs based on specifications. The requirements are formulated in temporal logic. The description of test cases is extended by control patterns enabling to cope with the demands of parallel applications. For the formulation of these patterns, an abstract execution model called POEM is introduced. After executing a parallel program with respect to a test case specification and its patterns, the resulting trace is checked against the temporal logic specification of the predefined requirements. 1. Introduction The process of software engineering for parallel and distributed applications is still lacking the completeness and the comfort of developing sequential ones. This is especially true for the phase of testing parallel programs [12]. This phase is of high importance as we can see from sequential programming where it consumes about 50 % of time and money during the development life cycle [8]. As appropriate met..