SCATTER LOAD FOR SYSTEM TEST

Software systems such as file systems in a computer are tested by scatter load testing. Scatter load testing is accomplished by the computer system applying randomly selected operative test situations to the software system. The operative test situations are randomized by the computer randomly selecting a geometry, or configuration, for the software system under test and randomly selecting a workload on the selected software system configuration. The randomization of workload selection can be further enhanced by expanding the workload to one or more tasks and randomly selecting objects, actions and parameters that make up each workload task to be performed during the test. As the random operative situation is run on the system, operation test results are output from the computer to indicate the performance of the software system being tested. Choice constraints may be placed on the random selection of the various test elements of the operative test situation. Each choice of software system configuration, workload, and operations and parameters within a workload task may be compared against constraints for these test elements. Thus, the testing may be constrained to randomly select only operative test situations that are useful and effective test situations within a test sub-domain of a larger test domain containing all possible operative test situations.