Fujitsu has used the potential of cloud computing to implement highly detailed verification of Java software using parallel processing.
The complexity of verification of software has been an issue for computer firms. According to Fujitsu Laboratories, by using the parallel processing available in cloud computing, it is possible to dramatically shorten the time required for full software verification.
The task of verification can be complicated.
“Testing the underlying software of a shopping website, for example, involves generating numerous test cases (test case generation) that represent different permutations of user actions and circumstances, such as whether or not a product ID or the correct quantity was entered, and generating data for each permutation,” said Fujitsu.
“Using these data, programmers must check that the program actually operates properly,” said the company.
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed technology that performs verification of Java software in parallel.
“This makes it possible to accelerate the verification process by leveraging the computational power of cloud computing. In an experiment using ten processing nodes, the new software achieved approximately ten times the performance of existing technology,” said the company.
The technique makes use of the the Java PathFinder verification tool developed by NASA in the US.
This provides functions for automatically executing tests on Java programs using a technique called symbolic execution, without the need to manually enter any test cases or test data.
Fujitsu Laboratories has expanded these functions, in order to process character string data, which accounts for much of the data typically processed by business applications, thus enabling verification of business applications that entail such character string data.