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SE Radio 685: Will Wilson on Deterministic Simulation Testing

SE Radio 685: Will Wilson on Deterministic Simulation Testing

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers vor 11 Monaten

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In this episode, Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder
of Antithesis, explores Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST)
with host Sriram Panyam. Wilson was part of the pioneering team
at FoundationDB that developed this revolutionary testing
approach, which was later acquired by Apple in 2015. After seeing
that even sophisticated organizations lacked robust testing for
distributed systems, Wilson co-founded Antithesis in 2018 to make
DST commercially available.

Deterministic simulation testing runs software in a fully
controlled, simulated environment in which all sources of
non-determinism are eliminated or controlled. Unlike traditional
testing or chaos engineering, DST operates in a separate
environment from production, allowing for aggressive fault
injection without risk to live systems. The key breakthrough is
perfect reproducibility -- any bug found can be recreated exactly
using the same random seed.

Antithesis built "The Determinator," a custom deterministic
hypervisor that simulates entire software stacks including
virtual hardware, networking, and time. The system can compress
years of stress testing into shorter timeframes by running
simulations faster than wall-clock time. All external interfaces
that could introduce non-determinism (network calls, disk I/O,
system time) are mocked or controlled by the simulator.

The approach has proven effective with major organizations
including MongoDB, Palantir, and Ethereum. For Ethereum's
critical "Merge" upgrade in 2022, Antithesis found and helped fix
several serious bugs that could have been catastrophic for the
live network. The platform typically finds bugs that traditional
testing methods miss entirely -- such as those arising from rare
race conditions, complex timing issues, and unexpected system
interactions.

This episode is sponsored by Monday Dev