All‐uses testing of shared memory parallel programs

Yang, Cheer-Sun; Pollock, Lori

doi:10.1002/stvr.262

Cited by 24 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Tasiran et al present a coverage metric, called location pairs, developed to assist in the testing of shared‐memory concurrent programs. Location pairs is formed by points where a shared variable is used in the threads.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Souza

Brito

et al. 2015

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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SUMMARYTesting is a key activity to assure the quality of concurrent applications. In recent years, a variety of different mechanisms have been proposed to test concurrent software. However, a persistent problem is the high testing cost because of the large number of different synchronization sequences that must be tested. When structural testing criteria are adopted, a large number of infeasible synchronization sequences is generated, increasing the testing cost. Although the use of reachability testing reduces the number of infeasible combination (because only feasible synchronization sequences are generated), many synchronization combinations are also generated, and this again results in a testing cost with exponential behavior. This paper presents a new composite approach that uses reachability testing to guide the selection of the synchronization sequences tests according to a specific structural testing criterion. This new composite approach is empirically evaluated in the context of message-passing concurrent programs developed with MPI. The experimental study evaluates both the cost and effectiveness of proposed composite approach in comparison with traditional reachability testing and structural testing. The results confirm that the use of the new composite approach has advantages for testing of concurrent applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: structural testing; reachability testing; concurrent programs; experimental study INTRODUCTIONConcurrent software is being increasingly used with the availability of multicore processors and computer clusters. Many modern business applications now use concurrency to improve overall system performance. However, all concurrent software contains features, such as nondeterminism, synchronization, and interprocess communication, which make concurrent software significantly more complex than sequential software. These features impose new challenges for testing and increase the difficulty of demonstrating the correct execution of the application in all possible conditions. Traditional testing techniques are often not well-suited to the testing of concurrent (or parallel) software. Many researchers have developed specific testing techniques to address specific issues such as nondeterminism, concurrency, communication, synchronization, race conditions, and replay testing [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].In previous work, structural testing criteria for concurrent programs were proposed by Souza et al. [12], defining test models and tools to test message-passing software. This work was extended by Sarmanho et al. [13] to test shared-memory software. These structural testing criteria are designed to explore information about the control, data, and communication flows of concurrent programs, considering both their sequential and parallel aspects. These contributions are related to the coverage analysis concept, in which a coverage model is first defined, and then the model is evaluated during the execution of the program to determine whether th...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical evaluation of a new composite approach to the coverage criteria and reachability testing of concurrent programs

Souza

Brito

et al. 2015

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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“…Yang et al . extended the data flow criteria to shared‐memory parallel programs. The parallel program model used consists of multiple threads of control that can be executed simultaneously.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural testing for message‐passing concurrent programs: an extended test model

Souza

Zaluska

2012

Concurrency and Computation

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SUMMARYDeveloping high-quality, error-free message-passing concurrent programs is not trivial. Although a number of different primitives with associated semantics are available to assist such development, they often increase the complexity of the testing process. In this paper, we extend our previous test model for messagepassing programs and present new structural testing criteria, taking into account additional features used in this paradigm, such as collective communication, non-blocking sends, distinct semantics for non-blocking receives, and persistent operations. Our new model also recognizes that sender primitives cannot always be matched with every receive primitive. This improvement allows us to remove statically a significant number of infeasible synchronization edges that would otherwise have to be analyzed later by the tester. In this paper, the test model is presented using the Message-Passing Interface standard; however, our new model has been designed to be flexible, and it can be configured to support a range of different messagepassing environments or languages. We have carried out case studies showing the applicability of the new test model to represent message-passing programs and also to reveal errors, mainly those errors related to inter-process communication. In addition to increasing the number of features supported by the test model, we have also reduced the overall cost of testing significantly. Our case studies suggest that the number of synchronization edges can be reduced by up to 93%, mainly by eliminating infeasible edges between unmatchable communication primitives. The main contribution of the paper is to present a more flexible test model that provides improved coverage for message-passing programs and at the same time reduces the cost of testing significantly.

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“…Using controlled execution, it is possible to force the order these executions. Considering to first execution (PCPC) the executed paths and their synchronizations are: 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,12} π 1 = {1, 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12} π 2 = {1, 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 To illustrate a communication fault consider that avail was initialized with 1 (1 0 ) and all synchronizations are correct. This fault can be revealed with the execution of the required elements comm-c-use (7 2 , 7 2 , avail) and edge-s (9 2 , 5 2 ).…”

Section: Data Flow and Communication-based Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PPFG (Parallel Program Flow Graph) is a graph where was inserted the concept of synchronization node to the CFG [5,10]. In the PPFG each process that composes the program has its own CFG.…”

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confidence: 99%