Spectrum-based fault localization for diagnosing concurrency faults

Abstract

Concurrency faults are activated by specific thread interleavings at runtime. Traditional fault localization techniques and static analysis fall short to diagnose these faults efficiently. Existing dynamic fault-localization techniques focus on pinpointing data-access patterns that are subject to concurrency faults. In this paper, we propose a spectrum-based fault localization technique for localizing faulty code blocks instead. We systematically instrument the program to create versions that run in particular combinations of thread interleavings. We run tests on all these versions and utilize spectrum-based fault localization to correlate detected errors with concurrently executing code blocks. We have implemented a tool and applied our approach on several industrial case studies. Case studies show that our approach can effectively and efficiently localize concurrency faults.