Debugging concurrent Ada programs by deterministic execution

Author

Tai, Kuo-Chung ; Carver, Richard H. ; Obaid, Evelyn E.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC, USA

Volume

17

Issue

1

fYear

1991

fDate

1/1/1991 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

45

Lastpage

63

Abstract

A language-based approach to deterministic execution debugging of concurrent Ada programs is presented. The approach is to define synchronization (SYN)-sequences of a concurrent Ada program in terms of Ada language constructs and to replay such SYN-sequences without the need for system-dependent debugging tools. It is shown how to define a SYN-sequence of a concurrent Ada program in order to provide sufficient information for deterministic execution. It is also shown how to transform a concurrent Ada program P so that the SYN-sequences of previous executions of P can be replayed. This transformation adds an Ada task to P that controls program execution by synchronizing with the original tasks in P. A brief description is given of the implementation of tools supporting deterministic execution debugging of concurrent Ada programs

Keywords

Ada; parallel programming; program debugging; Ada language constructs; SYN-sequences; concurrent Ada programs; deterministic execution debugging; previous executions; program execution; sufficient information; synchronisation sequences; tools; transformation; Computer science; Mathematics; Software debugging; Software engineering; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.67578

Filename

67578