Time-Dependent Problems

Source

Problem

  • Sometimes the time between events has significance (the SUT behaves differently depending on the timing)
  • Sometimes race conditions can cause unpredictable behavior

Symptoms

Look in the code for:
  • timeouts
  • timed sleeps
  • values or computations that depend on the time

How To Test

Generate inputs that are varied in time (i.e. some close together, some not close together).
From Udacity's Software Testing Unit 1.