The Case for System Testing with Swift Hierarchical VM Fork

System testing is an essential part of software development. Unfortunately, comprehensive testing of large systems is often resource intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore the possibility of leveraging hierarchical virtual machine (VM) fork to optimize system testing in the cloud. Testing using VM fork has the potential to save system configuration effort, obviate the need to run redundant common steps, and reduce disk and memory requirements by sharing resources across test cases. A preliminary experiment that uses VM fork to run a subset of MySQL database test suite shows that the technique reduces VM run time to complete all test cases by 60%.