Reachability Testing: An Approach to Testing Concurrent Software

Hwang, Gwan-Hwan; Tai, Kuo-Chung; Huang, Ting-Lu

doi:10.1142/s0218194095000241

Cited by 56 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…In the field of the behavior of concurrent programs, Carver et al [12] proposed repeatable deterministic testing, while the idea of systematic generation of all thread schedules for concurrent program testing came with works on reachability testing [13,14]. The VeriSoft model checker [15] applied state exploration directly to executable programs, enumerating states rather than schedules.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing Threads Schedule Alignments to Expose the Interference Bug Pattern

Bhattacharya

El-Mahi

Duclos

et al. 2012

Search Based Software Engineering

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Abstract. Managing and controlling interference conditions in multi-threaded programs has been an issue of worry for application developers for a long time. Typically, when write events from two concurrent threads to the same shared variable are not properly protected, an occurrence of the interference bug pattern could be exposed. We propose a mathematical formulation and its resolution to maximize the possibility of exposing occurrences of the interference bug pattern. We formulate and solve the issue as an optimization problem that gives us (1) the optimal position to inject a delay in the execution flow of a thread and (2) the optimal duration for this delay to align at least two different write events in a multi-threaded program. To run the injected threads and calculate the thread execution times for validating the results, we use a virtual platform modelling a perfectly parallel system. All the effects due to the operating system's scheduler or the latencies of hardware components are reduced to zero, exposing only the interactions between threads. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has formalized the alignment of memory access events to expose occurrences of the interference bug pattern. We use three different algorithms (random, stochastic hill climbing, and simulated annealing) to solve the optimization problem and compare their performance. We carry out experiments on four small synthetic programs and three real-world applications with varying numbers of threads and read/write executions. Our results show that the possibility of exposing interference bug pattern can be significantly enhanced, and that metaheuristics (hill climbing and simulated annealing) provide much better results than a random algorithm.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing Threads Schedule Alignments to Expose the Interference Bug Pattern

Bhattacharya

El-Mahi

Duclos

et al. 2012

Search Based Software Engineering

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“…In the experiment, we applied the notion of forced deterministic testing for concurrent programs [12] to conduct the evaluation.…”

Section: A Experimental Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study of the Use of Frankl-Weyuker Data Flow Testing Criteria to Test BPEL Web Services

Mei

Chan

Tse

et al. 2009

2009 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference

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Abstract-Programs using service-oriented architecture (SOA) often feature ultra-late binding among components. These components have well-defined interfaces and are known as web services. Messages between every pair of web services dually conform to the output interface of a sender and the input interface of a receiver. Unit testing of web services should not only test the logic of web services, but also assure the correctness of the web services during input, manipulation, and output of messages. There is, however, little software testing research in this area. In this paper, we study the unit testing problem to assure components written in orchestration languages, WS-BPEL in particular. We report an empirical study of the effectiveness of the Frankl-Weyuker data flow testing criteria (particularly the all-uses criterion) on WS-BPEL subject programs. Our study shows that conventional data flow testing criteria can be much less effective in revealing faults in interface artifacts (WSDL documents) and message manipulations (XPath queries) than revealing faults in BPEL artifacts.

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“…This is typically defined in terms of the fraction of program paths tested [7][28]; paths, which in the multi-tasking/distributed scenarios we consider, are defined by the execution order graphs. The derived execution orderings also provide means for detecting violations of basic assumptions during testing, e.g., the execution of a scenario not defined by the EOG may be caused by an exceeded worst case execution time.…”

Section: Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%