Location pairs: a test coverage metric for shared-memory concurrent programs

We present a coverage metric targeted at shared-memory concurrent programs: the Location Pairs (LP) coverage metric. The goals of this metric are (i) to measure how thoroughly a program has been tested from a concurrency standpoint, i.e., whether enough qualitatively different thread interleavings h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Empirical software engineering : an international journal Vol. 17; no. 3; pp. 129 - 165
Main Authors: Tasiran, Serdar, Keremoğlu, M. Erkan, Muşlu, Kivanç
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Boston Springer US 01.06.2012
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Compilers
Computer Science
Concurrency
Debugging
Errors
Interactive
Interpreters
Java (programming language)
Monitoring
Position (location)
Programming Languages
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Coverage metrics
Multi-threaded software
Concurrency
Shared memory
Testing
ISSN:1382-3256, 1573-7616
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present a coverage metric targeted at shared-memory concurrent programs: the Location Pairs (LP) coverage metric. The goals of this metric are (i) to measure how thoroughly a program has been tested from a concurrency standpoint, i.e., whether enough qualitatively different thread interleavings have been explored, and (ii) to guide testing towards unexplored concurrency scenarios. This metric was inspired by an access pattern known to lead to high-level concurrency errors in industrial software and in the literature. We built a monitoring tool to measure LP coverage of test programs. We used the LP metric for interactive debugging, and compared LP coverage with other concurrency coverage metrics on Java benchmarks. We demonstrated that LP coverage corresponds better to concurrency errors, is a better measure of how well a program is exercised concurrency-wise by a test set, reaches saturation later than other coverage metrics, and is viable and useful as an interactive testing and debugging tool.
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ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-011-9166-8