SIT Professor and Chair of Software Testing and Analysis, Mauro Pezzè, recently co-published a paper on software testing, verification and reliability titled ‘Statically driven generation of concurrent tests for thread‐safe classes’. The paper, addresses concurrency testing, a key component in exposing concurrency faults in thread-safe classes, noting the difficulties of generating fault-revealing concurrent tests within an affordable budget due to huge search space of possible concurrent tests.

Together with his colleague Valerio Terragni, Pezzè presents DepCon+, a novel approach that reduces the search space of concurrent tests by leveraging statically computed dependencies among public methods. A DepCon+ prototype was developed for Java, evaluating the approach on 19 known concurrency faults of thread‐safe classes that lead to thread‐safety violations of either exception or deadlock type. The paper shows that DepCon+ is more effective than state‐of‐the‐art approaches in exposing the concurrency faults, dramatically reducing the search space of possible concurrent tests, without missing any thread‐safety violations.

Read the full paper here.