Mysteries of Dropbox: Property-based Testing of a Distributed Synchronization Service
Paper in proceeding, 2016

File synchronization services such as Dropbox are used by hundreds of millions of people to replicate vital data. Yet rigorous models of their behavior are lacking. We present the first formal---and testable---model of the core behavior of a modern file synchronizer, and we use it to discover surprising behavior in two widely deployed synchronizers. Our model is based on a technique for testing nondeterministic systems that avoids requiring that the system's internal choices be made visible to the testing framework.

dropbox

software testing

file synchronization

random testing

quickcheck

Author

John Hughes

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Benjamin C. Pierce

University of Pennsylvania

Thomas Arts

Quviq Ab

Ulf Norell

University of Gothenburg

Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2016

135-145 7515466
978-1-5090-1826-0 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1109/ICST.2016.37

ISBN

978-1-5090-1826-0

More information

Latest update

9/6/2018 1