Efficient Distributed Test Architectures for Large-Scale Systems

Typical testing architectures for distributed software rely on a centralized test controller, which decomposes test cases in steps and deploy them across distributed testers. The controller also guarantees the correct execution of test steps through synchronization messages. These architectures are not scalable while testing large-scale distributed systems due to the cost of synchronization management, which may increase the cost of a test and even prevent its execution. This paper presents a distributed architecture to synchronize the test execution sequence. This approach organizes the testers in a tree, where messages are exchanged among parents and children. The experimental evaluation shows that the synchronization management overhead can be reduced by several orders of magnitude. We conclude that testing architectures should scale up along with the distributed system under test.