Concurrency bugs in open source software: a case study

Concurrent programming puts demands on software debugging and testing, as concurrent software may exhibit problems not present in sequential software, e.g., deadlocks and race conditions. In aiming to increase efficiency and effectiveness of debugging and bug-fixing for concurrent software, a deep u...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of internet services and applications Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15
Main Authors: Abbaspour Asadollah, Sara, Sundmark, Daniel, Eldh, Sigrid, Hansson, Hans
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Springer London 01.12.2017
Sociedade Brasileira de Computação
Brazilian Computing Society (SBC)
Subjects:
Apache Accumulo
Apache Hadoop
Apache Oozie
Apache spark
Apache ZooKeeper
Bug severity
Case study
Computer Applications
Computer Communication Networks
Computer programming
Computer Science
Computer software
Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks
Concurrency
Concurrency bugs
Concurrency control
Debugging
Empirical analysis
Fixing time
Free and Open Source Software Development
Freeware
Information Systems and Communication Service
IT in Business
Open source software
Open systems
Processor Architectures
Program debugging
Reproducibility
Software
Software development tools
Software engineering
Software testing
Bug severity
Case study
Fixing time
Concurrency bugs
Apache Oozie
Apache ZooKeeper
Apache spark
Open source software
Apache Hadoop
Apache Accumulo
ISSN:1867-4828, 1869-0238, 1869-0238
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Concurrent programming puts demands on software debugging and testing, as concurrent software may exhibit problems not present in sequential software, e.g., deadlocks and race conditions. In aiming to increase efficiency and effectiveness of debugging and bug-fixing for concurrent software, a deep understanding of concurrency bugs, their frequency and fixing-times would be helpful. Similarly, to design effective tools and techniques for testing and debugging concurrent software, understanding the differences between non-concurrency and concurrency bugs in real-word software would be useful. This paper presents an empirical study focusing on understanding the differences and similarities between concurrency bugs and other bugs, as well as the differences among various concurrency bug types in terms of their severity and their fixing time, and reproducibility. Our basis is a comprehensive analysis of bug reports covering several generations of five open source software projects. The analysis involves a total of 11860 bug reports from the last decade, including 351 reports related to concurrency bugs. We found that concurrency bugs are different from other bugs in terms of their fixing time and severity while they are similar in terms of reproducibility. Our findings shed light on concurrency bugs and could thereby influence future design and development of concurrent software, their debugging and testing, as well as related tools.
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ISSN:1867-4828
1869-0238
1869-0238
DOI:10.1186/s13174-017-0055-2