Publication Details
Advances in Noise-based Testing of Concurrent Programs
Dudka Vendula, Ing.
Křena Bohuslav, Ing., Ph.D. (DITS)
Letko Zdeněk, Ing., Ph.D. (CM-SFE)
Ur Shmuel
Vojnar Tomáš, prof. Ing., Ph.D. (DITS)
testing; dynamic analysis; noise injection; multi-threaded software; coverage metrics; genetic algorithm; meta-heuristic algorithms
Testing of concurrent software written in programming languages like Java and C/C++ is ahighly challenging task owing to the many possible interactions among threads. Asimple, cheap, and effective approach that addresses this challenge is testing with noise injection, which influences the scheduling so that different interleavings of concurrent actions are witnessed. In this paper, multiple results achieved recently in the area of noise-injection-based testing by the authors are presented in a unified and extended way. In particular, various concurrency coverage metrics are presented first. Then, multiple heuristics for solving the noise placement problem (i.e. where and when to generate noise) as well as the noise seeding problem (i.e. how to generate the noise) are introduced and experimentally evaluated. In addition, several new heuristics are proposed and included into the evaluation too. Recommendations on how to set up noise-based testing for particular scenarios are then given. Finally, anovel use of the genetic algorithm for finding suitable combinations of the many parameters of tests and noise techniques is presented.
@article{BUT119778,
author="Jan {Fiedor} and Vendula {Dudka} and Bohuslav {Křena} and Zdeněk {Letko} and Shmuel {Ur} and Tomáš {Vojnar}",
title="Advances in Noise-based Testing of Concurrent Programs",
journal="Software Testing Verification and Reliability",
year="2015",
volume="25",
number="3",
pages="272--309",
doi="10.1002/stvr.1546",
issn="1099-1689",
url="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stvr.1546/abstract"
}