Large-scale software unit testing on the grid

Grid computing, which is characterized by large-scale sharing and collaboration of dynamic resources, has quickly become a mainstream technology in distributed computing. In this article, we present a grid-based unit test framework, which takes advantage of the large-scale and cost-efficient computational grid resources as a software testing test bed to support automated software unit test in a complicated system. Within this test framework, a dynamic bag-of-tasks model is used to manage test suites on the grid. Moreover, an adaptive task scheduling mechanism based on swarm intelligence approach is developed to tackle the performance heterogeneity and resource dynamism problems presented in a grid-computing environment and efficiently utilize the grid resources. Overall, we expect that the grid-based unit test framework can significantly reduce test cost in complex software systems and accelerate the testing process with large number of unit test suites. © 2006 IEEE.