Writing code to test race conditions is tough. Recently I looked at ThreadWeaver, which is a framework that Alasdair Mackintosh wrote for writing multi-threaded unit tests in Java. I liked how it allows you to write deterministic code where you can control the exact sequence/interweaving of operations between threads. In other words, it allows you to precisely create and test a race condition.
The only downside to the framework was that it used Ant. This meant it took a little bit of extra work to set up since I had to download the jars and figure out the project structure. Considering all of this, I took some time to “Mavenize” the project and put a version on Github. I’m currently working with another developer to possibly publish 0.20 to Maven Central.
Other issues I encountered were “no object instrumented” and “class not instrumented” errors. After posting a question to the mailing list, the author responded almost immediately and I resolved the issue by placing my ThreadWeaver “Scripts” code within the ThreadWeaver annotations like @ThreadMain, etc.
Open source is awesome :).