WSBAParticipantCompletionTestCase XTS integration test fails intermittently

When a WSBA participant employs the ParticipantCompletion protocol, it is the responsibility of the participant to notify the coordinator when it has completed its work. This notification is asynchronous.

In the 'WSBAParticipantCompletionTestCase' test, the client invokes the participant's web service who notifies completion just before returning from the invocation. The client then sends a message to the coordinator requesting to close (complete) the activity.

As the "complete" message (from the participant to coordinator) is asynchronous, we now have a race. If the Client's close message is processed by the coordinator before the participant's "complete" message, then the coordinator cancels the BA as not all participants have completed. This results in the client receiving a TransactionRolledBackException and the completed participant is (eventually) compensated. The outcome is atomic, but a BA that would have otherwise succeeded, is unsuccessful.

In reality we only expect this scenario to happen in the rather artificial scenario where all parties (client, coordinator and participants) are on the same server. It also only seems to happen on very slow machines. Therefore, it's fine to fix the test to prevent this scenario from arising, rather than to somehow change the protocol (without breaking the WS-BA standard) to prevent it.

We have two options, that I can see to fix the test:

1) Byteman Rendezvous. Here we would introduce a dependency on Byteman and write a script that delays the client's close message until all participants' 'complete' messages have been acknowledged by the coordinator. This is probably an over-engineered solution as we would be introducing Byteman, to these tests, for this single case.

2) We add a Thread.sleep(10000) to the test, just before the client sends the 'close' message to the coordinator. This is what we did to the XTS tests in the JBossTS project as a stop-gap until we decided how to do it "properly".

I suggest we go with 2) as it is the simplest solution. The extra time added to the test is just 10s as there are is only one test affected by this. In the future, when we have more tests we should reduce this sleep period or consider using another solution (such as Byteman), in order to keep the test duration acceptable.