File Synchronization services

File synchronization services like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are increasingly popular—hundreds of millions of people entrust their precious data to them every day. But they are complex distributed systems, and their behaviour is subtler than you might think, especially when files are changed on more than one machine. What can we rely on when we use these applications—and how can they be tested effectively? At Oredev, John Hughes presents how Quviq and the University of Pennsylvania used QuickCheck to characterize their behaviour and generate tests, using Dropbox as the main example. And there may be a few surprises…

A research paper has been publised at IEEE Conference on Software Testing.