A Heuristic Region-based Concurrency Bug Testing Approach
Kuo-Cheng Chin, Ren‐Song Tsay, Hsin‐I Wu · 2020
In this paper, we propose an effective concurrency bug testing approach that focuses on suspicious bug-causing code regions instead of indiscriminately testing the whole program. Additionally, with a simple loop heuristic, the region-based approach effectively avoids the state explosion problem. It is highly efficient while guaranteeing to find any existing concurrency bugs in the specified code regions. We also devise an optimization scheme to reduce the number of interleavings to be examined to achieve maximum efficiency. Our method can conveniently identify bug-causing interleavings and hence significantly improve debugging efficiency. We have implemented the proposed approach and successfully tested on a few large application cases. The experimental results show that the approach can precisely identify bug sources and perform much more effectively than traditional approaches.