SEMINAR:Randomized Testing of Distributed Systems

Guest: Burcu Özkan, TU Delft

Title: Randomized Testing of Distributed Systems (CS, DSA, EE, IE)

Date/Time:December 4, 2024, 13:40

Location: FENS L030

Abstract: Distributed systems are prone to concurrency bugs due to the nondeterminism in the interleavings of the concurrent events in an execution. Detecting and diagnosing concurrency bugs in distributed systems is critical since unforeseen interleavings of concurrent messages, network, or process faults can result in unexpected, erroneous system behavior. However, concurrency bugs are hard to detect as they are triggered only in some subtle interleavings of the events.

Random testing is a practical way of searching for bugs in large distributed systems. While naïve random stress testing is unlikely to discover bugs that rarely occur, recent randomized testing algorithms offer effective testing methods. They provide theoretical guarantees on detecting bugs based on combinatorial results and borrowing ideas from formal methods and verification. In this talk, we will overview the key ideas in randomized testing techniques for detecting concurrency bugs in distributed systems.

Bio: Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan is an assistant professor and Delft Technology Fellow in the TU Delft Software Engineering Research Group. She received her PhD from Koç University Istanbul, Turkey, followed by postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Her research focuses on model checking, software testing and debugging of concurrent programs and distributed systems. Homepage: https://burcuku.github.io/home/