The Role of Stability Testing in Heterogeneous Application Environment

This paper presents an approach to system stability tests performed in Motorola private radio networks (PRN) department. The stability tests are among crucial elements of the department's testing strategy, such as functional testing, regression testing and stress testing. The gravity of the subject is illustrated with an example of a serious system defect: memory leak, whicht was detected in Solaris operating system during system stability tests. The paper provides technical background essential to understand the problem, as well as emphasizes the role of the tests in the problem solving. The following approaches to memory leaks detection are discussed: code review, memory debugging and system stability tests. The article presents several guidelines on stability test implementation and mentions the crucial elements of the PRN Department testing strategy: load definition, testing period and the system monitoring method.