Testing class libraries for RTSJ safety

ABSTRACT

The addition of new thread types and new memory areas by the Real-Time Specification for Java™ (RTSJ) [1] introduces new failure modes for existing class libraries. Existing tests for these class libraries will not cover execution with RTs, NHRTs and with the Immortal and Scoped memory areas. Writing new tests to cover these new cases can take significant time and effort. This paper introduces an approach we call AutoRTUnit that allows us to get test coverage for the new thread types and memory areas by reusing existing JUnit[2] based unit tests. In our case we applied it to expand our test coverage for a subset of the non-RTSJ APIs within our RTSJ-compliant Java virtual machine (JVM).

REFERENCES

• 1: Rudy Belliardi, Ben Brosgol, Peter Dibble, David Holmes, and Andy Wellings, "The Real-Time Specification for Java Version 1.0.1", Available: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=1
• 2: JUnit, Junit.org Resources for Test Driven Development, Available: http://www.junit.org
• 3: Joshua Auerbach , David F. Bacon , Bob Blainey , Perry Cheng , Michael Dawson , Mike Fulton , David Grove , Darren Hart , Mark Stoodley, Design and implementation of a comprehensive real-time java virtual machine, Proceedings of the 7th ACM & IEEE international conference on Embedded software, September 30-October 03, 2007, Salzburg, Austria [doi>10.1145/1289927.1289967]
• 4: Michael Dawson, Mike Fulton, John Kacur, Mark Stoodley, and Ryan Sciampacone, "Real-time Java, Part 1:Using the Java language for real-time systems", Available: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-rtj1.
• 5: Michael H. Dawson, Challenges in Implementing the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) in a Commercial Real-Time Java Virtual Machine, Proceedings of the 2008 11th IEEE Symposium on Object Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), p.241-247, May 05-07, 2008 [doi>10.1109/ISORC.2008.29]
• 6: Javolution, Available: http://javolution.org/
• 7: Trevor Harmon , Martin Schoeberl , Raimund Kirner , Raymond Klefstad, Toward Libraries for Real-Time Java, Proceedings of the 2008 11th IEEE Symposium on Object Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), p.458-462, May 05-07, 2008 [doi>10.1109/ISORC.2008.73]
• 8: Apache Harmony, Available: http://harmony.apache.org/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Testing tools (e.g., data generators, coverage testing)

General Terms:
Languages, Standardization, Verification

Keywords:
J9, JUnit, Java, RTSJ, WRT, real-time