Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Feedback-guided Adaptive Testing of Distributed Systems Designs
Ao Li, Carnegie Mellon University; Ankush Desai, Amazon Web Services; Rohan Padhye, Carnegie Mellon University
Validating distributed systems for correctness poses significant challenges. Practitioners often rely on formal models of core system designs, which are then tested by exploring possible component interactions. Unfortunately, standard testing approaches based on random sampling of the state space are inefficient and prone to missing subtle bugs, as they lack guidance from the system's behavior.
To address this, we present Fest, a new testing system for formal models of distributed systems. Fest incorporates feedback-guided adaptive schedule generation, drawing inspiration from grey-box fuzzing, to steer exploration towards maximizing behavioral coverage and uncovering bugs more effectively. Our implementation in the P programming framework demonstrates significant improvements across 94 distributed system model configurations: up to 41× (1.5× average) improvement in behavioral coverage, 278× (15× average) improvement in scenario coverage, and 33% more bugs detected compared to existing methods. These results highlight Fest's effectiveness in ensuring the robustness of distributed systems through improved testing efficiency.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
Feedback-guided Adaptive Testing of Distributed Systems Designs
Ao Li, Carnegie Mellon University; Ankush Desai, Amazon Web Services; Rohan Padhye, Carnegie Mellon University
Validating distributed systems for correctness poses significant challenges. Practitioners often rely on formal models of core system designs, which are then tested by exploring possible component interactions. Unfortunately, standard testing approaches based on random sampling of the state space are inefficient and prone to missing subtle bugs, as they lack guidance from the system's behavior.
To address this, we present Fest, a new testing system for formal models of distributed systems. Fest incorporates feedback-guided adaptive schedule generation, drawing inspiration from grey-box fuzzing, to steer exploration towards maximizing behavioral coverage and uncovering bugs more effectively. Our implementation in the P programming framework demonstrates significant improvements across 94 distributed system model configurations: up to 41× (1.5× average) improvement in behavioral coverage, 278× (15× average) improvement in scenario coverage, and 33% more bugs detected compared to existing methods. These results highlight Fest's effectiveness in ensuring the robustness of distributed systems through improved testing efficiency.
View the full NSDI '26 program at usenix.org/conference/nsdi26/technical-sessions
