A Splitting Strategy for Testing Concurrent Programs
Xiaofang Qi, Huayang Zhou · 2019
Reachability testing is an important approach to testing concurrent programs. It generates and exercises every partially ordered synchronization sequence automatically and on-the-fly without constructing a static model and saving any test history. However, test sequences generated by existing reachability testing are ineffective in detecting concurrency faults involved in access anomalies, such as accessing shared variables without proper protections or synchronizations, incorrectly shrinking or shifting critical regions, etc. In this paper, we present a splitting strategy as well as a prototype tool called SplitRichTest for revealing such concurrency faults. SplitRichTest adopts the framework of conventional reachability testing while implementing our splitting strategy. By splitting relevant codes, SplitRichTest generates and exercises fine-grained synchronization sequences. The key ingredient of SplitRichTest is an efficient heuristic algorithm to select and sort candidate splitting points. We conducted an empirical study on representative concurrent Java programs and evaluated the effectiveness of SplitRichTest using mutation testing. Experimental results show that our splitting strategy facilitates generating more fine-grained synchronization sequences and significantly improves concurrency fault detection capability of reachability testing.