Communications of the ACM
Testing a Distributed System
Credit: Vadim Petrakov
Distributed systems can be especially difficult to program for a variety of reasons. They can be difficult to design, difficult to manage, and, above all, difficult to test. Testing a normal system can be trying even under the best of circumstances, and no matter how diligent the tester is, bugs can still get through. Now take all of the standard issues and multiply them by multiple processes written in multiple languages running on multiple boxes that could potentially all be on different operating systems, and there is potential for a real disaster.
Individual component testing, usually done via automated test suites, certainly helps by verifying that each component is working correctly. Component testing, however, usually does not fully test all of the bits of a distributed system. Testers need to be able to verify that data at one end of a distributed system makes its way to all of the other parts of the system and, perhaps more importantly, is visible to the various components of the distributed system in a manner that meets the consistency requirements of the system as a whole.
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