DOTS—Distributed Object Test System

DOTS (Distributed Object Test System) is a distributed capture and replay tool that enables monitoring, testing, and debugging of distributed-object systems that conform to the Object Management Group's (OMG's) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification. DOTS provides the user with a unified view of distributed-object activity within a CORBA environment.

The DOTS architecture is comprised of a centralized controller and multiple, distributed capture/replay agents. The controller issues capture and replay commands to the agents who in turn act on these commands.

DOTS implements a General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) decoder that, when given an Interface Definition Language (IDL) specification of the objects deployed in a given environment, provides the user with a CORBA-message-level view of the distributed object system's behavior. Decoded CORBA messages can be modified by DOTS, and modified messages can be replayed by DOTS as part of a test scenario.

The DOTS capture/replay features provide a test-and-debug facility that is similar to that provided by source-level debuggers on stand-alone systems. For example, by having access to the IDL files for a given CORBA system, a test engineer can capture object interactions within the distributed-object environment, examine the method invocations between objects, and replay the (potentially modified) method invocations at different rates.