On Godefroid´s state-less search technique for testing concurrent programs

P. Godefroid (1997) developed a state-space exploration technique that does not store states in memory. This stateless search technique is effective for testing concurrent programs. It performs deterministic executions of a concurrent program by automatically controlling the execution of synchronization operations. This technique also uses partial order reduction methods to reduce the chance of executing two or more different totally-ordered paths with the same partial order. In this paper, we propose extensions to Godefroid´s technique and compare it with other stateless search techniques for testing concurrent programs. Our empirical results indicate that a combination of stateless searching and a simple cycle prediction method is very cost-effective for detecting deadlocks and violations of assertions