Fundamental issues in testing distributed real-time systems

This paper examines the fundamental problems that one faces when testing a distributed, hard real-time system. It specifically identifies the influences of the distributedness and of the real-time requirements of the systems considered. We show how the usual problems of testing become more difficult, and which additional problems are introduced, because of these additional system characteristics.We identify six such fundamental problems: Organization, Observability, Reproducibility, Host/Target Approach, Environment Simulation, and Representativity. These, as well as their interrelations, are presented in a general framework that is independent of a particular system architecture or application. This framework could serve as a starting point for all activities geared towards a particular system architecture or a specific application.As an example, we illustrate how these test problems have been handled when developing a test methodology for the distributed real-time system MARS. Finally, the additional issues of test data generation and test result analysis are briefly discussed.