dotnet / dotnet/orleans

Unit Testing Orleans Applications

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enhancement hacktoberfest help wanted
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Description

Hi All,
I'm a researcher in MSR. I'm fairly new to Orleans, but I have been working on "design and testing of asynchronous applications" for some time. I wanted to ask a question and then request for feedback on some of our recent work if you think it is relevant for Orleans developers.

Question: How do people do "unit testing" of Orleans applications? Are there standard mocks (for grains, etc.) that allow testing without production deployment? I've noticed this question come up several times in discussion forums for Reliable Actors (in Service Fabric).

Feedback Requested: We have done some work ourselves:
https://github.com/p-org/PSharpModels
We have mocks of Orleans grains (as well as ReliableActors of Fabric). These allow testing of (largely) unmodified applications without deployment. We also have tools that do robust testing by covering many different interleavings and interactions between different grains, even covering non-determinism from timers. (Think CHESS or Cuzz, if you are familiar with those tools from MSR.) The underlying technology is P#:
https://github.com/p-org/PSharp

Our modeling of Orleans is far from complete, but we have sorted out many of the basic issues and have started pushing real code through. Would anyone be interested in using this? We'd love to engage with early adopters. Is this even relevant or are there better solutions out there?

Thanks, we would appreciate any feedback!
Akash & the P# team

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No Orleans files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by reviewing the PSharpModels and PSharp projects linked in the issue, then compare their Orleans grain mocks and interleaving tests with Orleans' current testing approach; done means documenting whether this should be adopted or pursued as an Orleans testing feature.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
distributed-systems, testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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