Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Communications of the ACM
Automated testing of protocol specifications and their implementations
SIGCOMM '84 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM symposium on Communications architectures and protocols: tutorials & symposium
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An approach to testing the consistency of specifications is explored, which is applicable to the design validation of communication protocols and other cases of step-wise refinement. In this approach, a testing module compares a trace of interactions obtained from an execution of the refined specification (e. g. the protocol specification) with the reference specification (e. g. the communication service specification). Non-determinism in reference specifications presents certain problems. Using an extended finite state transition model for the specifications, a strategy for limiting the amount of non-determinacy is presented. An automated method for constructing a testing module for a given reference specification is discussed. Experience with the application of this testing approach to the design of a Transport protocol and a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm is described.