Keith E. Moore

A Runtime and Analysis Framework Support for Unit Component Testing in Distributed Systems

This paper presents a test framework to support unit component testing in distributed component-based systems that are built upon component technologies like CORBA, COM/.NET, J2EE/RMI. The framework exploits automatic code instrumentation at the stubs and the skeletons of the calls in order to monitor a global call session. The calls can be cross-thread, cross-process and cross-processor. We further define certain testing-related interfaces for driver components in the component test harness and extend the IDL compiler, such that at runtime, test-related attributes can be automatically embedded in the call session identifier and propagated system-wide. As a result, various support for unit component testing can be enabled, including behavior coordination for stub components, collaborator component determination from historical execution, selective regression testing, and crash site pinpointing

Enabling Rapid Feature Deployment on Embedded Platforms with JeCOM Bridge

A new class of embedded devices is emerging that has a mixture of traditional firmware (written in C/C++) with an embedded virtual machine (e.g., Java). For these devices, the main part of the application is usually written in C/C++ for efficiency and extensible features can be added on the virtual machine (even after product shipment). These late bound features need access to the C/C++ code and may in fact replace or extend functionality that was originally deployed in ROM. This paper describes the JeCOM bridge that dramatically simplifies development and deployment of such add-on features for the embedded devices and allows the features to be added without requiring the firmware to be reburned or reflashed. After being dynamically loaded onto the device’s Java virtual machine, the JeCOM bridge facilitates transparent bi-directional communication between the Java application and the underlying firmware. Our bridging approach focuses on embedded applications development and deployment, and makes several significant advances over traditional Java Native Interface or other fixed stub/skeleton COM/CORBA/RMI approaches. In particular, we address object discovery, object lifecycle management, and memory management for parameter passing. While the paper focuses on the specific elements and experiences with an HP proprietary infrastructure, the techniques developed are applicable to a wide range of mixed language and mixed distributed object-based systems.

Autonomic Printing Infrastructure for the Enterprise

In this paper we describe a solution to introduce autonomic behavior to the enterprise printing infrastructure. The techniques proposed do not need an overhaul to replace existing print devices—our solution introduces fail-over print capability to the millions of printers that comprise the installed base. We describe techniques for “printer neighborhood-awareness” and for enabling an easy path to the fail-over solution deployment without requiring custom PC software or new driver installs. We also discuss our experiences deploying this solution in a live enterprise IT environment.

Exploiting global causality in testing of distributed and component-based applications

A new approach to testing component-based applications is presented, which exploits the practice in component-based systems of generating stub/skeleton modules and using these stubs/skeletons to construct a global perspective of end-to-end causality of inter-component communication. This global causality is captured regardless of reentrancy, callbacks, thread and process boundaries, and unsynchronized clocks. The captured logs created from the interception points are used to construct a system-wide component interaction model that can expose the inter-component dependencies usually hidden in static analysis of application code. These discovered dependencies are used to create a test boundary for applying a component test harness for that component and the set of dependent components. Similarly, the discovered dependencies can be applied to pruning the available test cases to identify those cases that are best suited to exposing defects when one or more components are changed. A particular advantage of the approach has been the ability to isolate the sequence of events that led up to a crash or a deadlock condition and view the entire system behavior (not just a particular threads perspective or a linear log of intercepted messages).