An automatically-generated run-time instrumenter to reduce coverage testing overhead

Authors:
J. Jenny Li;David M. Weiss;Howell Yee
Affiliations:
Avaya Labs, Basking Ridge, NJ, USA;Avaya Labs, Basking Ridge, NJ, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, MA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Automation of software test
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Coverage testing is often used as a quantified measurement of testing progress. One important issue of code coverage testing is the overhead of program execution monitoring that inserts probes into programs, either at run-time or off-line, to record program execution code coverage information (e.g., "1" for covered and "0" for not-covered). For time sensitive systems, such overhead may alter the program execution behavior or impact its performance, which is an even more critical problem for embedded systems where memory and CPU resources are limited. This paper proposes a new Super Nested Block (SNB) method to reduce instrumentation run-time overhead. The method improves upon two existing technologies: 1) program analysis for selecting instrumentation points, and 2) on-line run-time instrumentation eliminating repeated probes. We implemented the SNB method on an automatic generated on-line instrumenter of a code coverage testing tool and found that the instrumentation overhead was minor, less than 1% of overall execution time, and all real-time execution external behaviors were preserved.