Input-Driven Active Testing of Multi-threaded Programs

• Published in: 2015 Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC) pp. 246 - 253
• Main Authors: Yue, Han, Wu, Peng, Chen, Tsong-Yueh, Lv, Yi
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2015
• Subjects: Computer bugs; Concurrency; Concurrent computing; Conferences; Criteria; Exposure; Instruction sets; Measurement; Programming; Software engineering; Strategy; Subspace constraints; Testing
• ISSN: 2640-0715; 1530-1362
• DOI: 10.1109/APSEC.2015.34

It is still a challenge to select "good" test inputs for concurrent programs within limited testing resources. We present in this paper a test case diversity metric for multi-threaded programs, which evaluates a test input with its effect in exposing concurrent thread interactions. We then propose an input-driven active testing approach with two test input selection strategies based on our test case diversity metric. We implement our testing approach based on Maple, an interleaving coverage-driven active testing tool. The effectiveness and efficiency of our testing approach are compared closely with Maple, which on its own is supplied with random test inputs. Experimental results show that our testing approach can outperform the original active testing approach in the number of test inputs executed and the time usage for fulfilling the interleaving coverage criterion of Maple. The selected test inputs based on our test case diversity metric are very cost-effective in exposing concurrent thread interactions and hence can help detect concurrency bugs with less cost and effort.