Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

Chapter 13. Parallelism

This chapter introduces techniques to tackle one of the harder testing problems: deterministically reproducing multithreading race conditions. Unlike most of the other techniques presented in this book, the ones in this chapter are less likely to be used in a test-driven development scenario. Race conditions typically show up as bugs, not as behaviors that we predict during development or that we use to derive coverage. However, race-condition bugs can be some of the most frustrating for users, developers, and support people alike. Reproducing these bugs to ensure that they are fixed and stay fixed provides a significant advance in confidence for our software processes and systems. These techniques also apply quite well ...