testing

Increased demand for test expertise has generated interest in testing-specific professional certifications. Alyn Wambeke sorts through certification options for testers.

The basic problem with exception handling is that it is difficult! Exception handling in modern languages makes it easy to drastically change the contents of memory. The next instruction executed may be very distant from the site of the exception, and required cleanup might not be done. In C++ the problem can be particularly acute, with lost memory not reclaimed correctly. For these reasons, it's critical for good testing of exception handling that we test all representative sequences of normal and exceptional calls.

Collectively, problems related to resource sharing in multi-threaded, multi-processor, and distributed systems are termed "concurrency problems." Concurrency problems are further divided into several major subcategories such as deadlock, livelock, priority inversion, starvation, and race conditions. This article will focus on race conditions.

Gene Sally looks at network testing with NIST Net. He concludes that NIST Net is a powerful tool, allowing you to emulate network conditions seldom occurring in your lab but nonetheless prevalent in the real world. You can reproduce the conditions in which your application fails, easing diagnosis and repair.