Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Property-Based Testing - The ProTest Project
John Derrick
1
,NeilWalkinshaw
1
,ThomasArts
2
, Clara Benac Earle
4
,
Francesco Cesarini
3
, Lars-Ake Fredlund
4
, Victor Gulias
5
,
John Hughes
6
, and Simon Thompson
7
1
Department of Computing, University of Sheeld, Sheeld, S1 4DP, UK
2
Goteborgs Universitet, Goeteboug, Sweden
3
Erlang Solutions Ltd, London
4
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
5
Lambdastream Servicios Interactivos SL, A Coruna, Spain
6
Quviq AB, Savedalen, Sweden
7
University of Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, UK
J.Derrick@dcs.shef.ac.uk
Abstract.
The ProTest project is an FP7 STREP on property based
testing. The purpose of the project is to develop software engineering
approaches to improve reliability of service-oriented networks; support
fault-finding and diagnosis based on specified properties of the system.
And to do so we will build automated tools that will generate and run
tests, monitor execution at run-time, and log events for analysis.
The Erlang / Open Telecom Platform has been chosen as our initial
implementation vehicle due to its robustness and reliability within the
telecoms sector. It is noted for its success in the ATM telecoms switches
by Ericsson, one of the project partners, as well as for multiple other uses
such as in facebook, yahoo etc. In this paper we provide an overview
of the project goals, as well as detailing initial progress in developing
property based testing techniques and tools for the concurrent functional
programming language Erlang.
1
Introduction
Communication networks, based on telephony, wireless and Internet, have over
the last few years been converging. At the present time and for the foreseeable
future, more and more services will be added to these merging networks. More-
over, these services are becoming more complex, both in themselves and in their
interactions with each other and their end users. The telecoms industry has an
admirable record in providing reliability and robust services to its clients, and
indeed it is the telecoms industry that can point to 5-nines reliability: that is
99.999% reliability, of their core systems.
This context provides the motivation of the ProTest project - namely that of
maintaining 5-nines reliability in future service-oriented networks and systems.
The software for new services and network devices is rapidly growing in com-
plexity, among other things because of the variety of formats and multiplicity
of delivery modes evident in modern communication protocols (with thousands
