Guided test visualization: Making sense of errors in concurrent programs

This paper describes a tool to help debug error traces found by the Java Pathfinder model checker in concurrent Java programs. It does this by abstracting out thread interactions and program locations that are not obviously pertinent to the error through control flow or data dependence. The tool then iteratively refines the abstraction by adding thread interactions at critical locations until the error is reachable. The tool visualizes the entire process and enables the user to systematically analyze each abstraction and execution. Such an approach explicitly identifies specific context switch locations and thread interactions needed to debug a concurrent error trace in small to moderate programs that can be managed by the Java Pathfinder Tool.