Analysis and Testing of Concurrent Programs

This monograph is based on the dissertation thesis of Zdeněk Letko, supervised by Tomáš Vojnar and co-supervised by Bohuslav Křena.The thesis starts by providing a taxonomy of concurrency-related errors and an overview of their dynamic detection. Then, concurrency coverage metrics which measure how well the synchronisation and concurrency-related behaviour of tested programs has been examined are proposed together with a~methodology for deriving such metrics. The proposed metrics are especially suitable for saturation-based and search-based testing. Next, a novel coverage-based noise injection techniques that maximise the number of interleavings witnessed during testing are proposed. A comparison of various existing noise injection heuristics and the newly proposed heuristics on a set of benchmarks is provided, showing that the proposed techniques win over the existing ones in some cases. Finally, a novel use of stochastic optimisation algorithms in the area of concurrency testing is proposed in the form of their application for finding suitable combinations of values of the many parameters of tests and the noise injection techniques. The approach has been implemented in a prototype way and tested on a set of benchmark programs, showing its potential to significantly improve the testing process.