Spontaneous detection of infinite loops and livelocks in dynamic testing of concurrent programs

Che Sheng Lin*, Gwan Hwan Hwang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Concurrent programs that contain busy-waiting loops or iterative statements might not stop when they are tested dynamically due to some processes getting stuck in infinite loops or the execution of several loops forming a livelock. The traditional way of handling this problem in dynamic testing - interrupting the execution of the concurrent program when a predefined maximum execution time is exceeded. In this paper, we propose a dynamic decision scheme that spontaneously stops the execution of tested processes when they get stuck in an infinite loop or form a livelock. Since the halting problem is proven to be undecidable, we propose heuristic algorithms to cope with this. We apply the proposed scheme to a dynamic testing methodology called dynamic effective testing, which can perform state- and transition-cover testing for concurrent programs with busy-waiting loops. The implementation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, TASE 2009
Pages291-292
Number of pages2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
Event2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, TASE 2009 - Tianjin, China
Duration: 2009 Jul 292009 Jul 31

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, TASE 2009

Other

Other2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, TASE 2009
Country/TerritoryChina
CityTianjin
Period2009/07/292009/07/31

Keywords

  • Concurrent testing
  • Infinite loop
  • Livelock

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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