A combinatorial testing strategy for concurrent programs

Authors:
Yu Lei;Richard H. Carver;Raghu Kacker;David Kung
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019-0015, U.S.A.;Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, U.S.A.;Information Technology Library, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8910, U.S.A.;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019-0015, U.S.A.
Venue:
Software Testing, Verification & Reliability
Year:
2007

Citing 0
Cited 6

Structural Testing for Semaphore-Based Multithread Programs

ICCS '08 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Computational Science, Part I
Mutation testing from probabilistic and stochastic finite state machines

Journal of Systems and Software
Test case generation for the task tree type of architecture

Information and Software Technology
A survey of combinatorial testing

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Research in concurrent software testing: a systematic review

Proceedings of the Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging
An empirical evaluation of several test-a-few strategies for testing particular conditions

Software—Practice & Experience

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

One approach to testing concurrent programs is called reachability testing, which derives test sequences automatically and on-the-fly, without constructing a static model. Existing reachability testing algorithms are exhaustive in that they are intended to exercise all possible synchronization sequences of a concurrent program with a given input. In this paper, we present a new testing strategy, called t-way reachability testing, that adopts the dynamic framework of reachability testing but selectively exercises a subset of synchronization sequences. The selection of the synchronization sequences is based on a combinatorial testing strategy called t-way testing. We present an algorithm that implements t-way reachability testing, and report the results of several case studies that were conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The results indicate that t-way reachability testing can substantially reduce the number of synchronization sequences exercised during reachability testing while still effectively detecting faults. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.