Fault Detection through Sequential Filtering of Novelty Patterns

Multi-threaded applications are commonplace in today´s software landscape. Pushing the boundaries of concurrency and parallelism, programmers are maximizing performance demanded by stakeholders. However, multi-threaded programs are challenging to test and debug. Prone to their own set of unique faults, such as race conditions, testers need to turn to automated validation tools for assistance. This paper´s main contribution is a new algorithm called multi-stage novelty filtering (MSNF) that can aid in the discovery of software faults. MSNF stresses minimal configuration, no domain specific data preprocessing or software metrics. The MSNF approach is based on a multi-layered support vector machine scheme. After experimentation with the MSNF algorithm, we observed promising results in terms of precision. However, MSNF relies on multiple iterations (i.e., stages). Here, we propose four different strategies for estimating the number of the requested stages.