Validation and test generation for object-oriented distributed software

The development of correct OO distributed software is a daunting task as soon as the distributed interactions are not trivial. This is due to the inherent complexity of distributed systems (latency, error recovery, etc.), leading to numerous problems such as deadlocks, race conditions, and many difficulties in trying to detect and reproduce such error conditions and debug them. The OO technology is ill-equipped to deal with this dimension of the problem. On the other hand, the willingness of mastering this complexity in the context of telecommunication protocols gave birth to specific formal verification and validation tools. The aim of this paper is to explore how the underlying technology of these tools could be made available to the designer of OO distributed software. We propose a framework allowing the integration of formal verification and validation technology in a seamless OO life-cycle based on UML, the Unified Modeling Language. From a UML model, this framework would allow to conduct model checking activities as well as random simulation and automatic test generation.