A Concurrency Testing Tool and Its Plug-Ins for Dynamic Analysis and Runtime Healing

Křena, Bohuslav; Letko, Zdeněk; Nir-Buchbinder, Yarden; Tzoref-Brill, Rachel; Ur, Shmuel; Vojnar, Tomáš

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04694-0_8

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The two other programs are real life case studies (see, e.g., for more detail [20]). WebCrawler is a part of an older version of a major IBM production software.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Light-weight static analyses may produce many false alarms, many static analyses may be specialised to a narrow class of bugs, and heavy-weight approaches may have troubles with scalability. There also exist approaches that combine static and dynamic analyses in an attempt to suppress their deficiencies [5,20]. A use of static analyses to help search-based testing to focus on interesting parts of the tested code may be another interesting issue for future research.…”

Section: Finding Bugs In Concurrent Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A platform for search-based testing of concurrent software

Křena

Letko

Vojnar

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging

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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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“…The two other programs are real life case studies (see, e.g., for more detail [20]). WebCrawler is a part of an older version of a major IBM production software.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Finding Bugs In Concurrent Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

A platform for search-based testing of concurrent software

Křena

Letko

Vojnar

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…These approaches are related to what we propose in this article with null operations. Also related to null operations, some techniques introduce variations in the scheduling of multithreaded applications (using sleep()) to avoid race conditions and deadlocks in Java applications [Nir-Buchbinder et al 2008;Křena et al 2009]. While these techniques target solely nondeterministic failures, Automatic Workarounds can deal with deterministic failures as well.…”

Section: Related Work On Self-healing Systems and Software Redundancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Workarounds

Carzaniga

Gorla

Perino

et al. 2015

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Despite the best intentions, the competence, and the rigorous methods of designers and developers, software is often delivered and deployed with faults. To cope with imperfect software, researchers have proposed the concept of self-healing for software systems. The ambitious goal is to create software systems capable of detecting and responding "autonomically" to functional failures, or perhaps even preempting such failures, to maintain a correct functionality, possibly with acceptable degradation. We believe that self-healing can only be an expression of some form of redundancy, meaning that, to automatically fix a faulty behavior, the correct behavior must be already present somewhere, in some form, within the software system either explicitly or implicitly. One approach is to deliberately design and develop redundant systems, and in fact this kind of deliberate redundancy is the essential ingredient of many fault tolerance techniques. However, this type of redundancy is also generally expensive and does not always satisfy the time and cost constraints of many software projects.With this article we take a different approach. We observe that modern software systems naturally acquire another type of redundancy that is not introduced deliberately but rather arises intrinsically as a by-product of modern modular software design. We formulate this notion of intrinsic redundancy and we propose a technique to exploit it to achieve some level of self-healing. We first demonstrate that software systems are indeed intrinsically redundant. Then we develop a way to express and exploit this redundancy to tolerate faults with automatic workarounds. In essence, a workaround amounts to replacing some failing operations with alternative operations that are semantically equivalent in their intended effect, but that execute different code and ultimately avoid the failure. The technique we propose finds such workarounds automatically. We develop this technique in the context of Web applications. In particular, we implement this technique within a browser extension, which we then use in an evaluation with several known faults and failures of three popular Web libraries. The evaluation demonstrates that automatic workarounds are effective: out of the nearly 150 real faults we analyzed, 100 could be overcome with automatic workarounds, and half of these workarounds found automatically were not publicly known before.

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“…When dealing with today's real‐life applications, one cannot apply such restrictions. The original coverage metric was therefore slightly modified . The modified metric is referenced to as DUPairs * later.…”

Section: Concurrency Coverage Metrics and Saturation‐based Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For experimental evaluation of concurrency metrics, the platform called SearchBestie was used to set up and execute tests with the IBM ConTest. The ConTest tool provides a facility for bytecode instrumentation and a listeners infrastructure allowing one to create plug‐ins for collecting various pieces of information about the multi‐threaded Java programmes being executed as well as to easily implement various algorithms for dynamic analyses. The tool is itself able to collect structural coverage metrics (basic blocks, methods) and some concurrency‐related metrics (ConcurPairs, Sync) too.…”

Section: Concurrency Coverage Metrics and Saturation‐based Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in noise‐based testing of concurrent software

Fiedor

Hrubá

Křena

et al. 2014

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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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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A Concurrency Testing Tool and Its Plug-Ins for Dynamic Analysis and Runtime Healing

Cited by 10 publications

References 5 publications

A platform for search-based testing of concurrent software

A platform for search-based testing of concurrent software

Automatic Workarounds

Advances in noise‐based testing of concurrent software

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