The current increased demand for distributed applications in domains such as web services and cloud computing has significantly increased interest in concurrent programming. This demand in turn has resulted in new testing methodologies for such systems, which take account of the challenges necessary to test these applications. This paper presents a systematic review of the published research related to concurrent testing approaches, bug classification and testing tools. A systematic review is a process of collection, assessment and interpretation of the published papers related to a specific search question, designed to provide a background for further research. The results include information about the research relationships and research teams that are working in the different areas of concurrent programs testing.

SUMMARYTesting is a key activity to assure the quality of concurrent applications. In recent years, a variety of different mechanisms have been proposed to test concurrent software. However, a persistent problem is the high testing cost because of the large number of different synchronization sequences that must be tested. When structural testing criteria are adopted, a large number of infeasible synchronization sequences is generated, increasing the testing cost. Although the use of reachability testing reduces the number of infeasible combination (because only feasible synchronization sequences are generated), many synchronization combinations are also generated, and this again results in a testing cost with exponential behavior. This paper presents a new composite approach that uses reachability testing to guide the selection of the synchronization sequences tests according to a specific structural testing criterion. This new composite approach is empirically evaluated in the context of message-passing concurrent programs developed with MPI. The experimental study evaluates both the cost and effectiveness of proposed composite approach in comparison with traditional reachability testing and structural testing. The results confirm that the use of the new composite approach has advantages for testing of concurrent applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: structural testing; reachability testing; concurrent programs; experimental study INTRODUCTIONConcurrent software is being increasingly used with the availability of multicore processors and computer clusters. Many modern business applications now use concurrency to improve overall system performance. However, all concurrent software contains features, such as nondeterminism, synchronization, and interprocess communication, which make concurrent software significantly more complex than sequential software. These features impose new challenges for testing and increase the difficulty of demonstrating the correct execution of the application in all possible conditions. Traditional testing techniques are often not well-suited to the testing of concurrent (or parallel) software. Many researchers have developed specific testing techniques to address specific issues such as nondeterminism, concurrency, communication, synchronization, race conditions, and replay testing [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].In previous work, structural testing criteria for concurrent programs were proposed by Souza et al. [12], defining test models and tools to test message-passing software. This work was extended by Sarmanho et al. [13] to test shared-memory software. These structural testing criteria are designed to explore information about the control, data, and communication flows of concurrent programs, considering both their sequential and parallel aspects. These contributions are related to the coverage analysis concept, in which a coverage model is first defined, and then the model is evaluated during the execution of the program to determine whether th...

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Previous work has demonstrated that the use of software testing concepts for teaching introductory programming courses may be a good practice for the students. Indeed, these courses provide limited opportunities for the teacher regarding dynamic activities that could help students in the learning process. This paper describes an approach in which test sets are reused in the context of teaching introductory programming courses, as an alternative to increase the quality of the programs generated by students. An experimental study was carried out to investigate the impact of reusing test cases during the programming learning. The objective is to evaluate if the use of test cases might improve the quality of programs implemented by the students. Sixty undergraduate students participated in the experiment, implementing programs in the domain of vectors. A set of reference programs was used to generate test cases, based on functional testing, to be reused by the students to test their programs. Considering a range of 1 − 10, the programs’ quality increased from 5.3 to 7.4 using this approach. The results provide evidences that the reuse of test cases during introductory programming courses may help to increase the quality of the programs generated by students, motivating them to apply software testing during the development of the programs.