Vive la Différence: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications

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Abstract

Software rollout is the process of replacing the version of an application that is currently running in production with a new version. Many subtle and catastrophic bugs occur during software rollout. There are many existing techniques to improve the odds of a rollout completing successfully, but these techniques don’t work well when the application has shared, persistent, mutable state. In this paper, we present a practical framework to test the rollout of stateful applications. Our framework uses diff testing to verify that the new version of an application behaves identically to the currently running version that will be replaced. The framework has three main components to safely and efficiently compare the behavior of the two versions. First, we implement database branching on top of Postgres. Second, we implement an efficient algorithm to diff two database branches. Third, we describe how to replay client requests to improve test coverage. Finally, we identify three common categories of rollout bugs and demonstrate how our framework can find these bugs with minimal performance overhead.