Predicting concurrency bugs
Bo Zhou, Iulian Neamtiu, Rajiv Gupta · 2015
Concurrency bugs are difficult to find and fix. To help with finding and fixing concurrency bugs, prior research has mostly focused on static or dynamic analyses for finding specific classes of bugs. We present an approach whose focus is understanding the differences between concurrency and non-concurrency bugs, the differences among various concurrency bug classes, and predicting bug quantity, type, and location, from patches, bug reports and bug-fix metrics. First, we show that bug characteristics and bug-fixing processes vary significantly among different kinds of concurrency bugs and compared to non-concurrency bugs. Next, we build a quantitative predictor model to estimate concurrency bugs appearance in future releases. Then, we build a qualitative predictor that can predict the type of concurrency bug for a newly-filed bug report. Finally, we build a bug location predictor to indicate the likely source code location for newly-reported bugs. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on three popular projects, Mozilla, KDE, and Apache.