Setac: A Framework for Phased Deterministic Testing of Scala Actor Programs

Scala provides an actor library where computation entities, called actors, communicate by exchanging messages. The schedule of message exchanges is in general nondeterministic. Testing non-deterministic programs is hard, because it is necessary to ensure that the system under test has executed all important schedules. Setac is our proposed framework for testing Scala actors that (1) allows programmers to specify constraints on schedules and (2) makes it easy to check test assertions that require actors to be in a stable state. Setac requires little change to the program under test and requires no change to the actor run-time system. In sum, Setac aims to make it much simpler to test nondeterministic actor programs in Scala.