Should I unit test concurrency?

Question

I have a few methods that are impacted by concurrency. Specifically "Rush" (a.k.a Race) conditions. Should I unit test them or integrate/black-box test them?

I think that setting up a unit test might be a rather difficult task, but also is integration test...

Also I don't think it's possible to test that explicitly. Maybe some integration tests that will sporadically fail — vkurchatkin, Dec 31 '13 at 17:53
Relevant question over at programmers SE: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/196105/testing-multi-threaded-race-conditions — George, Dec 31 '13 at 18:02

Jon Reid · Answer 1 · 2014-01-01T20:20:44.887

4

Unit tests must be deterministic, so concurrency doesn't belong there. (I keep my unit tests completely synchronous.)

Go for integration tests to sniff out race conditions — but be prepared for false positives. In other words, the tests passing is no proof that you don't have a race condition. But a failure will alert you to something you need to fix.

edited Jan 01 '14 at 20:20

answered Jan 01 '14 at 20:15

Jon Reid

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 05 '18 at 20:03

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i've found this article and its quite instructive about my question: https://testing.googleblog.com/2014/02/minimizing-unreproducible-bugs.html

edited May 05 '18 at 20:03

Jon Reid

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answered Feb 12 '14 at 12:02

Leonardo

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Should I unit test concurrency?

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