DCO Analyzer: Local Controllability and Observability Analysis and Enforcement of Distributed Test Scenarios

TL;DR

DCO Analyzer is a tool that verifies local controllability and observability in distributed test scenarios, ensuring efficient and autonomous testing of heterogeneous systems by minimizing coordination messages.

Contribution

It introduces the first method to analyze UML-specified distributed test scenarios for local properties and automatically enforces them with minimal coordination.

Findings

Checks if test scenarios are locally controllable and observable

Automatically determines minimal coordination messages needed

Enhances autonomous and efficient distributed testing

Abstract

To ensure interoperability and the correct behavior of heterogeneous distributed systems in key scenarios, it is important to conduct automated integration tests, based on distributed test components (called local testers) that are deployed close to the system components to simulate inputs from the environment and monitor the interactions with the environment and other system components. We say that a distributed test scenario is locally controllable and locally observable if test inputs can be decided locally and conformance errors can be detected locally by the local testers, without the need for exchanging coordination messages between the test components during test execution (which may reduce the responsiveness and fault detection capability of the test harness). DCO Analyzer is the first tool that checks if distributed test scenarios specified by means of UML sequence diagrams exhibit those properties, and automatically determines a minimum number of coordination messages to enforce them.