Basset: a tool for systematic testing of actor programs

This paper presents Basset, a tool for systematic testing of JVM-based actor programs. The actor programming model offers a promising approach for developing reliable concurrent and distributed systems. Since the actor model is based on message passing and disallows shared state, it avoids some of the problems inherent in shared-memory programming, e.g., low-level dataraces involving access to shared data. However, actor programs can still have bugs that result from incorrect orders of messages among actors or processing of messages by individual actors. To systematically test an actor program, it is necessary to explore different message delivery schedules that might occur during execution. Basset facilitates such exploration and provides a generic platform that can support actor systems that compile to Java bytecode. Our current implementation of Basset supports testing of programs developed using the ActorFoundry library and the Scala programming language. Categories and Subject De...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Steven Lauterburg, Rajesh K. Karmani, Darko Marinov, Gul Agha
• Keywords: Actor, Actor Program, Actor Programming Model, SIGSOFT 2010, Software Engineering