Unit testing concurrent software - what do you do?

Question

As software gets more and more concurrent, how do you handle testing the core behaviour of the type with your unit tests (not the parallel behaviour, just the core

Answer 1

The field of Unit testing for race conditions and deadlocks is relativly new and lacks good tools.

I know of two such tools both in early alpha/beta stages:

• Microsoft's Chess
• Typemock Racer

ANother option is to try and write a "stress test" that would cause deadlocks/race condtions to surface, create multiople instances/threads and run them side by side. The downside of this approch is that if the test fail it would be very hard to reproduce it. I suggest using logs both in the test and production code so that you'll be able to understand what happened.