Contessa: Concurrency testing augmented with symbolic analysis

Abstract

Testing of multi-threaded programs poses enormous challenges. To improve the coverage of testing, we present a framework named Contessa that augments conventional testing (concrete execution) with symbolic analysis in a scalable and efficient manner to explore both thread interleaving and input data space. It is built on partial-order reduction techniques that generate verification conditions with reduced size and search space. It also provides a visual support for debugging the witness traces. We show its significance in testbeds. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.