Towards Effective Regression Testing of Concurrent Programs

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Towards Effective Regression Testing of Concurrent Programs"

by

Mr. Valerio TERRAGNI


Abstract:

Rapid advances in multi-core chip technology have lead to pervasive adoption of 
shared-memory concurrency programming, where software is jointly executed by 
multiple threads in a shared memory space. The inherent complexity of thread 
synchronization makes the evolution of concurrent programs error-prone, because 
code modification can affect how threads synchronize, which in turn can induce 
concurrency faults.

Regression testing is an important activity performed to guard against faults 
introduced by code changes. It is often performed by re-executing those 
existing tests that run successfully before code modification. If these tests 
trigger an unexpected failure, developers know that the code modification has 
introduced a regression fault. However, this approach has two fundamental 
problems that make it inefficient and ineffective to expose regression faults: 
(1) Re-executing all the existing tests often requires long execution times, 
which can easily exceed the affordable time budget. (2) Existing tests might 
not be adequate to expose regression faults - in this case developers have to 
write additional tests, which is costly and labor intensive. This situation 
aggravates for concurrent programs whose executions have non-deterministic 
behaviors, depending on the manifested thread interleavings.

To address these problems, in this thesis, we propose first a technique to 
reduce the execution times of regression testing concurrent programs by 
exploring only those interleavings that could reveal regression faults. 
Further, we propose a technique to alleviate the developers’s burden of writing 
new concurrent tests manually. We also present a combination of these two 
techniques to generate effective tests and oracles that expose and detect 
regression faults in concurrent programs.


Date:			Thursday, 27 October 2016

Time:                  	3:30pm - 5:30pm

Venue:                  Room 5506
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Sunghun Kim (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Frederick Lochovsky
  			Dr. Charles Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****