research-article

Testing concurrent programs using value schedules

Authors:

Steve MacDonaldAuthors Info & Claims

ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Pages 313 - 322

https://doi.org/10.1145/1321631.1321678

Published: 05 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Concurrent programs are difficult to debug and verify because of the nondeterministic nature of concurrent executions. A particular concurrency-related bug may only show up under certain rarely-executed thread interleavings. Therefore, commonly used debugging methodologies, such as inserting print statements, are no longer sufficient for uncovering concurrency-related bugs. However, many existing bug detection methods, such as dynamic analysis and model checking, have a very high computational cost.

In this paper, we introduce a new technique for uncovering concurrency-related bugs from multithreaded Java programs. Our technique uncovers concurrency-related bugs by generating and testing read-write assignment sequences, referred to as value schedules, of a multithreaded Java program. Our value-schedule-based technique distinguishes itself in its ability to avoid exploring superfluous program state space caused by speculative permutation on transitions. Therefore, our technique can achieve a higher degree of POR (Partial Order Reduction) than existing methods. We demonstrate our technique using some programs, with an implementation built using an explicit state model checker called JPF

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Cited By

Guo JLi ZShi CZhao R(2020)Thread Scheduling Sequence Generation Based on All Synchronization Pair Coverage CriteriaInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819402050005930:01(97-118)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2020
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194020500059
Bianchi FMargara APezze M(2018)A Survey of Recent Trends in Testing Concurrent Software SystemsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.270708944:8(747-783)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2707089
Choudhary ALu SPradel MUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)Efficient detection of thread safety violations via coverage-guided generation of concurrent testsProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2017.32(266-277)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2017.32
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASE '07: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

November 2007

590 pages

ISBN:9781595938824

DOI:10.1145/1321631

General Chair:
Kurt Stirewalt
Michigan State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Alexander Egyed
Teknowledge Corporation, USA
,
Bernd Fischer
University of Southampton, UK

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 November 2007

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ASE07: International Conference on Automated Software Engineering 2007

November 5 - 9, 2007

Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

Guo JLi ZShi CZhao R(2020)Thread Scheduling Sequence Generation Based on All Synchronization Pair Coverage CriteriaInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819402050005930:01(97-118)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2020
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194020500059
Bianchi FMargara APezze M(2018)A Survey of Recent Trends in Testing Concurrent Software SystemsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2017.270708944:8(747-783)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2017.2707089
Choudhary ALu SPradel MUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)Efficient detection of thread safety violations via coverage-guided generation of concurrent testsProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2017.32(266-277)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2017.32
Abbaspour Asadollah SSundmark DEldh SHansson HAfzal W(2017)10 Years of research on debugging concurrent and multicore softwareSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-015-9301-725:1(49-82)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-015-9301-7
Parízek PLhoták O(2015)Model checking of concurrent programs with static analysis of field accessesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.10.00898:P4(735-763)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2014.10.008
Lin CHwang G(2013)State-cover testing for nondeterministic terminating concurrent programs with an infinite number of synchronization sequencesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2012.06.00578:9(1294-1323)Online publication date: Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2012.06.005
Yu TSrisa-an WRothermel G(2012)SimTesterACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2365864.215103447:7(51-62)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2365864.2151034
Yu TSrisa-an WRothermel GHand Sda Silva D(2012)SimTesterProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2151024.2151034(51-62)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2151024.2151034
Tasiran SKeremoğlu MMuşlu K(2012)Location pairsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-011-9166-817:3(129-165)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
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Parizek PParizek PLhotak O(2011)Identifying future field accesses in exhaustive state space traversalProceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2011.6100154(93-102)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2011.6100154
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