Improving Riak testing suites using Common Test and Intercepts

Riak KV is an open source database with a strong focus on low latency, reliability and fault tolerance. Like any well tested computer system, batteries of tests are run to make sure that the database behaves correctly in typical but also adverse conditions such as network partitions, or even the deployment and upgrade process of nodes running different versions in the same cluster. To this end, one of the resources used by the Riak team is riak_test. Its main function is to provide a test running framework that overlaps significantly with Common Test, but it also contains cluster management and code intercept functionalities. We propose to break up this repository into its discrete components, making important contributions to the Erlang community and adapting the test runner framework into Common Test suites, vastly increasing the reporting ability of current Riak tests.