Chapter 12. Testing Concurrent Programs

Concurrent programs employ similar design principles and patterns to sequential programs. The difference is that concurrent programs have a degree of nondeterminism that sequential programs do not, increasing the number of potential interactions and failure modes that must be planned for and analyzed.

Similarly, testing concurrent programs uses and extends ideas from testing sequential ones. The same techniques for testing correctness and performance in sequential programs can be applied to concurrent programs, but with concurrent programs the space of things that can go wrong is much larger. The major challenge in constructing tests for concurrent programs is that potential failures may be rare probabalistic occurrences rather than deterministic ones; tests that disclose such failures must be more extensive and run for longer than typical sequential tests.