A classification of concurrency bugs in java benchmarks by developer intent

ABSTRACT

This work addresses the issue of selecting the formal correctness criterion for a concurrent Java program that best corresponds to the developer¿s intent. We study a set of concurrency-related bugs detected in Java benchmarks reported in the literature. On these programs, we determine whether race-freedom, atomicity or refinement is the simplest and most appropriate criterion for program correctness. Our purpose is to demonstrate empirically the fact that the appropriate fix for a concurrency error and the selection of a program analysis tool for detecting such an error must be based on the proper expression of the designer¿s intent using a formal correctness criterion.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mayur Naik , Alex Aiken , John Whaley, Effective static race detection for Java, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 11-14, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• 2: Robert H. B. Netzer , Barton P. Miller, What are race conditions?: Some issues and formalizations, ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems (LOPLAS), v.1 n.1, p.74-88, March 1992 [doi>10.1145/130616.130623]
• 3: Jeremy Manson , William Pugh , Sarita V. Adve, The Java memory model, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.378-391, January 12-14, 2005, Long Beach, California, USA
• 4: Tayfun Elmas , Serdar Tasiran , Shaz Qadeer, VYRD: verifYing concurrent programs by runtime refinement-violation detection, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 12-15, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
• 5: Cormac Flanagan , Stephen N Freund, Atomizer: a dynamic atomicity checker for multithreaded programs, Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.256-267, January 14-16, 2004, Venice, Italy
• 6: Eitan Farchi , Yarden Nir , Shmuel Ur, Concurrent Bug Patterns and How to Test Them, Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, p.286.2, April 22-26, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

General Terms:
Design, Verification

Keywords:
atomicity, concurrency errors, race condition, refinement, verification