Minimizing Coordination Channels in Distributed Testing

Testing may be used to show that a system under test conforms to its specification. In the case of a distributed system, one may have to use a distributed test architecture, involving p testers in order to test the system under test. These p testers may under some circumstances have to coordinate their actions with each other using external coordination channels. This may require the use of up to p − p unidirectional coordination channels in the test architecture, which can be an extensive and expensive setup. In this paper, we propose a method to generate checking sequences while minimizing the number of required coordination channels, by adapting existing methods that generate checking sequences to be applied in a centralized test architecture. We consider the case of unidirectional and bidirectional coordination channels, and the case of transitive coordination.