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ABSTRACT

Many strategies have been proposed to address the problems associated with managing increasingly complex computing systems. IBM's Autonomic Computing (AC) paradigm is one such strategy that seeks to alleviate system administrators from many of the burdensome tasks associated with manually managing highly complex systems. Researchers have been heavily investigating many areas of AC systems but there remains a lack of development in the area of testing these systems at runtime. Dynamic self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting features of autonomic systems require that validation be an integral part of these types of systems. In this paper we propose a methodology for testing AC systems at runtime using copies of managed resources. We realize the architecture of a self-testing framework using a small AC system. Our system is based on the concept of an autonomic container, which is a data structure that possesses autonomic characteristics and added ability to self-test.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

General Terms:
Management, Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
autonomic computing, testing, validation