Testing of concurrent software is extremely difficult. Despite all the progress in the testing and verification technology, concurrent bugs, the most common of which are deadlocks and races, make it to the field. This paper describes a set of techniques, implemented in a tool called ConTest, allowing concurrent programs to self-heal at run-time.Concurrent bugs have the very desirable property for healing that some of the interleaving produce correct results while in others bugs manifest. Healing concurrency problems is about limiting, or changing the probability of interleaving, such that bugs will be seen less. When healing concurrent programs, if a deadlock does not result from limiting the interleaving, we are sure that the result of the healed program could have been in the original program and therefore no new functional bug has been introduced.In this initial work which deals with different types of data races, we suggest three types of healing mechanisms:(1) changing the probability of interleaving by introducing sleep or yield statements or by changing thread priorities, (2) removing interleaving using synchronisation commands like locking and unlocking certain mutexes or waits and notifies, and (3) removing the result of "bad interleaving" by replacing the value of variables by the one that "should" have been taken. We also classify races according to the relevant healing strategies to apply.

The paper describes a generic, open-source infrastructure called SearchBestie (or S'Bestie for short) that we propose as a platform for experimenting with search-based techniques and for applying them in the area of software testing. Further, motivated by a lack of work on search-based testing targeted at identifying concurrency-related problems, we instantiate S'Bestie for search-based testing of concurrent programs using the IBM's concurrency testing infrastructure called ConTest. We demonstrate on series of experiments the capabilities of S'Bestie and (despite we have just made our first experiments with S'Bestie) also the fact that using search-based testing in the context of testing concurrent programs can be useful.

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SummaryTesting of concurrent software written in programming languages like Java and C/C++ is a highly challenging task owing to the many possible interactions among threads. A simple, cheap, and effective approach that addresses this challenge is testing with noise injection, which influences the scheduling so that different interleavings of concurrent actions are witnessed. In this paper, multiple results achieved recently in the area of noise‐injection‐based testing by the authors are presented in a unified and extended way. In particular, various concurrency coverage metrics are presented first. Then, multiple heuristics for solving the noise placement problem (i.e. where and when to generate noise) as well as the noise seeding problem (i.e. how to generate the noise) are introduced and experimentally evaluated. In addition, several new heuristics are proposed and included into the evaluation too. Recommendations on how to set up noise‐based testing for particular scenarios are then given. Finally, a novel use of the genetic algorithm for finding suitable combinations of the many parameters of tests and noise techniques is presented. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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