Bringing Modern Unit Testing Techniques to Sensornets

Abstract

Unit testing, an important facet of software quality assurance, is underappreciated by wireless sensor network (sensornet) developers. This is likely because our tools lag behind the rest of the computing field. As a remedy, we present a new framework that enables modern unit testing techniques in sensornets. Although the framework takes a holistic approach to unit testing, its novelty lies mainly in two aspects. First, to boost test development, it introduces embedded mock modules that automatically abstract out dependencies of tested code. Second, to automate test assessment, it provides embedded code coverage tools that identify untested control flow paths in the code. We demonstrate that in sensornets these features pose unique problems, solving which requires dedicated support from the compiler and operating system. However, the solutions have the potential to offer substantial benefits. In particular, they reduce the unit test development effort by a few factors compared to existing solutions. At the same time, they facilitate obtaining full code coverage, compared to merely 57-72% that can be achieved with integration tests. They also allow for intercepting and reporting many classes of runtime failures, thereby simplifying the diagnosis of software flaws. Finally, they enable fine-grained management of the quality of sensornet software.

Modeling and proving dynamic behaviors of a routing protocol: A tutorial

“…To this end, one may additionally employ finer-grained forms of testing, notably unit testing. 22,23 However, those are aimed at individual software modules and hence may be incapable of identifying bugs resulting from module interactions. Moreover, they require precise specifications of the behavior of the modules, which need not be trivial to derive from a specification for an entire protocol, especially since ideally the specification should not enforce a particular modularization.…”

“…In fact, unit testing can already be one example, as it is typically done together with programming. 23,24 Another popular solution is to employ modern programming languages 25 or domain-specific ones, 26 which aim to simplify software engineering and prevent certain types of bugs. Moreover, such languages are often accompanied by dedicated design pattern, 27 integrated development environments, 28 and debuggers, 29–31 the goal of which is to further improve software quality.…”

Software Adaptation in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Worse is the case when WSN software needs to be adaptive to environment dynamics that are, in general, unpredictable. Traditional testing approaches struggle in exhaustiveness [Iwanicki et al 2014]. Further, as the number of relevant environment dimensions grows, the number of possible situations the software may encounter increases exponentially; thus, scalability also becomes a hampering factor.…”

“…-We conceive automatic verification techniques to check the correctness of an application's design against the possible environment evolutions, as we describe in Section 5. Our techniques operate before deployment, thus requiring reduced effort than most exiting approaches [Iwanicki et al 2014;Romer and Ma 2009]. Further, they quickly return counterexamples expressed with the same design concepts of Section 3, facilitating the identification of issues.…”

“…The radio is also used to off-load the contact traces when in reach of a fixed base-station. Small solar panels harvest energy to prolong the node lifetime [Bhatti et al 2016 velopers often deploy systems with little confidence in their correctness [Sasnauskas et al 2010;Iwanicki et al 2014]. Contribution.…”