How Good is Static Analysis at Finding Concurrency Bugs?

Author

Kester, Devin ; Mwebesa, Martin ; Bradbury, Jeremy S.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Technol., Univ. of Ontario, Oshawa, ON, Canada

fYear

2010

fDate

12-13 Sept. 2010

Firstpage

115

Lastpage

124

Abstract

Detecting bugs in concurrent software is challenging due to the many different thread interleavings. Dynamic analysis and testing solutions to bug detection are often costly as they need to provide coverage of the interleaving space in addition to traditional black box or white box coverage. An alternative to dynamic analysis detection of concurrency bugs is the use of static analysis. This paper examines the use of three static analysis tools (Find Bugs, J Lint and Chord) in order to assess each tool´s ability to find concurrency bugs and to identify the percentage of spurious results produced. The empirical data presented is based on an experiment involving 12 concurrent Java programs.

Keywords

Java; program debugging; program diagnostics; Java programs; bug detection; concurrency bugs; concurrent software; static analysis tools; thread interleavings; Benchmark testing; Computer bugs; Concurrent computing; Instruction sets; Java; Synchronization; System recovery; concurrency; data race; deadlock; empirical software engineering; static analysis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2010 10th IEEE Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Timisoara

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-8655-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SCAM.2010.26

Filename

5601822