Easily build and run multithreaded unit tests

Introduction: As multi-core processors become mainstream, the development of parallel programs becomes an inevitable requirement. But we all know that there is a lot of uncertainty in parallel programs, which makes it difficult to develop and test parallel programs, so it is especially important for unit testing of parallel programs. However, creating multithreaded unit tests is not easy, and testing needs to consider synchronization between test threads, data sharing, and so on. For testing Java parallel programs, in combination with the Extended JUnit testing tool, this article introduces a complete process for creating multithreaded unit test cases that meet user requirements in an integrated development environment, allowing users to focus only on the logic and results of the test itself without having to understand the trivial details of the parallel execution of the test case , which will greatly facilitate parallel programmers to run parallel test cases and improve the development efficiency and quality of parallel programs.

Background

Parallel programs

A parallel program is a program that controls the execution of two or more operations that contain a sequence of instructions in a computer system, and is a "plan" for multiple operations on the processor, or for simultaneous execution of tasks. The processor, while running the parallel program, will work at the same time in different aspects of the same program, simultaneously controlling and running two or more operations that contain a series of instructions. The main purpose of concurrent programming is to save time for solving large and complex problems.

With the development of parallel programming technology for more than more than 20 years, high-performance parallel computer system is entering more and more application fields. However, compared with the development of hardware, the development of parallel software has lagged behind, which has influenced the exertion of hardware efficiency and restricted the wide application of parallel machine system, so the development and research of parallel programs are more and more deeply into the process of software development. Compared with the development of serial programs, there are many difficulties in the development and research of parallel programs, mainly because of the lack of effective parallel programming methods and tools, which makes it difficult to write proper parallel programs, understand the behavior of parallel programs, debug and optimize the performance of parallel programs.

Unit Test

Unit testing is a function-level test of the program code unit, which is the verification of the minimal Software Design unit.

Unit testing runs through the whole process of software development, which is self-evident to the importance of guaranteeing the quality of software. As a white-box test, unit testing is often done concurrently with development. There are also a lot of tools for unit testing, which includes the famous XUnit series. The Multithreaded Unit test tool that this article will cover is extended from the Java Unit Test tool JUnit.

Extending JUnit to implement multithreaded unit tests

For Java, JUnit is a favorite unit test tool for developers. It even affects the test framework for other languages. This, we can see from a wide range of xUnit frameworks. With the advent of the multi-core era, developers will need to do more and more concurrent program testing. Thanks to JUnit scalability, we can use Annotation to enable junit to better support parallel testing.

Thanks to JUnit's good scalability, extending junit to implement multithreaded unit tests here is achieved by generating the definition of the Annotation needed to implement multithreaded testing and implementing the custom test logic.

About extending JUNIT Implementation multithreaded unit testing, we have a special introduction to the extended JUnit test parallel program in another article, which we will focus on to illustrate how to create and run test cases in an integrated development environment.