A taxonomy of concurrency bugs in event-driven programs

Abstract

Concurrency bugs are a well-documented topic in shared-memory programs including event-driven programs which handle asynchronous events. Asynchronous events introduce fine-grained concurrency into event-driven programs making them hard to be thoroughly tested and debugged. Unfortunately, previous taxonomies on concurrency bugs are not applicable to the debugging of event-driven programs or do not provide enough knowledge on event-driven concurrency bugs. This paper classifies the event-driven program models into low and high level based on event types and carefully examines and categorizes concurrency bug patterns in such programs. Additionally, we survey existing techniques to detect concurrency bugs in event-driven programs. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first detailed taxonomy on concurrency bugs in event-driven programs. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.