A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software

Basic Differences

We want to consider some of the basic differences between sequential systems and these other models particularly from a testing perspective.

Nondeterminism

It is very difficult to exactly replicate a test run when the software contains multiple concurrent threads. The exact ordering is determined by the scheduler of the operating system. Changes in programs not associated with the system under test can affect the order in which threads of the system under test are executed. This means that if a failure is encountered, the defect is isolated and repaired and the test is repeated, we can't be certain that the defect is removed just because the error does not reoccur during a specific run.

This leads us to use one of the following ...