Falcon: fault localization in concurrent programs

Concurrency fault are difficult to find because they usually occur under specific thread interleavings. Fault-detection tools in this area find data-access patterns among thread interleavings, but they report benign patterns as well as actual faulty patterns. Traditional fault-localization techniques have been successful in identifying faults in sequential, deterministic programs, but they cannot detect faulty data-access patterns among threads. This paper presents a new dynamic fault-localization technique that can pinpoint faulty data-access patterns in multi-threaded concurrent programs. The technique monitors memory-access sequences among threads, detects data-access patterns associated with a program’s pass/fail results, and reports dataaccess patterns with suspiciousness scores. The paper also presents the description of a prototype implementation of the technique in Java, and the results of an empirical study we performed with the prototype on several Java benchmarks. The ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Sangmin Park, Richard W. Vuduc, Mary Jean Harrold
• Keywords: Actual Faulty Patterns, Data-access Patterns, Faulty Data-access Patterns, ICSE 2010, Software Engineering