Finding errors in multithreaded GUI applications

To keep a Graphical User Interface (GUI) responsive and active, a GUI application often has a main UI thread (or event dispatching thread) and spawns separate threads to handle lengthy operations in the background, such as expensive computation, I/O tasks, and network requests. Many GUI frameworks require all GUI objects to be accessed exclusively by the UI thread. If a GUI object is accessed from a non-UI thread, an invalid thread access error occurs and the whole application may abort. This paper presents a general technique to find such invalid thread access errors in multithreaded GUI applications. We formulate finding invalid thread access errors as a call graph reachability problem with thread spawning as the sources and GUI object accessing as the sinks. Standard call graph construction algorithms fail to build a good call graph for some modern GUI applications, because of heavy use of reflection. Thus, our technique builds reflection-aware call graphs. We implemented our t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Sai Zhang, Hao Lü, Michael D. Ernst
• Keywords: Call Graph Construction, Graph Reachability, Graphical User Interface, ISSTA 2012, Software Engineering