Testing concurrent programs using value schedules

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.

Location pairs: a test coverage metric for shared-memory concurrent programs

“…The idea of "value schedules" is explored by Chen and MacDonald in (Chen and MacDonald 2007). In this work as well, the smallest unit of concurrency coverage is concurrent definition-use (DU) pairs.…”

Identifying future field accesses in exhaustive state space traversal

“…The key idea proposed by Chen and MacDonald [7] is to address state explosion by exploring just one thread interleaving for each sequence of globally-visible actions. Static analyses are used to determine sequences of actions that are performed by different threads and have global effects, like accesses to fields on shared objects.…”

“…Other limitations include missing support for dynamically created threads and data non-determinism in the given Java program -our approach does not have these limitations. Experimental results published in [7] show a significant gain in performance, but it remains to be seen how much this approach would help on more complex Java programs, such as Simple JBB.…”

Testing Inter-layer and Inter-task Interactions in RTES Applications

“…Finally, work by Chen and MacDonald [9] supports testing for concurrency faults in multithreaded Java programs by overcoming scheduling non-determinism through value schedules. One major component of their approach involves identifying concurrent definition-use pairs.…”