Concurrent test generation using concolic multi-trace analysis

Abstract

Discovering concurrency bugs is inherently hard due to the nondeterminism in multi-thread scheduling. Predictive analysis techniques have been successfully used to find such bugs by observing given test runs, and then searching for other interesting thread interleavings. For sequential code, concolic execution techniques have been used successfully to generate interesting test inputs to increase structural code coverage such as branch or statement coverage. In this paper, we propose the use of a concolic multi-trace analysis (CMTA) to efficiently increase code coverage in concurrent programs. We have implemented CMTA, and show encouraging results for some interesting benchmark programs. © Springer-Verlag 2012.