Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Thursday May 01, 2008

OpenJDK: jtreg and regression tests

Huzzah! Through the dedicated efforts of Jon and others, jtreg is now open sourced! The jtreg program is the test harness used to run the regression tests that come with the JDK sources.

The JCK tests verify properties that should be true of all implementations of a given Java SE specification. The JDK regression tests are different; while many of them test properties that should be true of all implementations, some regression tests look at properties we want to be true of our JDK implementation but are not strictly required by the specification. Therefore, while a failing regression test most likely indicates a problem, in some cases the failure may not be a correctness issue per se. This situation is certainly feasible with ports of the JDK to operating systems sufficiently different than windows, Solaris, and Linux; shell tests are especially susceptible to those OS differences. Creating new shell tests should be avoided if possible and the porting effort may include updating regression tests to make them aware of the new platform.