Quality Assurance for Concurrent Software - An Actor-Based Approach

Distributed aspects and parallel architectures are increasingly gaining importance today, but developing high-quality concurrent software is still more of an art than an engineering process and requires a lot of experience. The reasons for this are presented within the first part of this paper along with common strategies for addressing them. In the second part, we propose using actor models in conjunction with well-established and well-known object-oriented concepts. Putting together these two concepts - object-orientation and actors - remedies several shortcomings of classical mutual-exclusion techniques and supports the development of concurrent and distributed software in a comfortable and scalable way. In the third part of the paper, we give an overview of our current research activities, where we are developing tools to express and orchestrate concurrent test cases, in particular for testing actors and their behavior. Overall, the combination of consistent constructive and analytical actions, as proposed in this paper, relieves developers of the burden of dealing with concurrency explicitly and provides them with a basis for building high-quality concurrent software.