Concurrent Bug Detection Using Invariant Analysis

Abstract

In concurrent programs, bug detection is a tedious job due to non-determinism and multiple thread control. The bug detection is done by checking the interleaving of threads which is not available in operational phases. So, static analysis is one of the preferred approaches for detection of concurrent bug. Invariant based testing technique is one approach of static analysis used for detecting the concurrent bugs. In this paper, we discuss an invariant based testing approach using three steps: (i) the invariants of a given concurrent program are generated using Daikon tool. (ii) The bad invariants are removed by using the static call graph of the source code, where the static call graph is generated by the javacg tool. (iii) The reduced invariant set is obtained by eliminating the bad and redundant invariants which is used for testcase generation. Using the reduced invariant set, we generate the testcases that are used to find the various concurrent bugs such as Deadlock, Atomicity violation and Bad composition. We conducted an experiment on a well-known concurrent program called the Dining Philosopher Problem. The experimental results show that, the testcases obtained from the reduced invariant set is able to detect more types and no. of concurrent bugs than the existing approach on invariant based testing.