Inter-context control-flow and data-flow test adequacy criteria for nesC applications

  • Authors:

  • Zhifeng Lai;S. C. Cheung;W. K. Chan

  • Affiliations:

  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong;Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong;University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

NesC is a programming language for applications that run on top of networked sensor nodes. Such an application mainly uses an interrupt to trigger a sequence of operations, known as contexts, to perform its actions. However, a high degree of inter-context interleaving in an application can cause it to be error-prone. For instance, a context may mistakenly alter another context's data kept at a shared variable. Existing concurrency testing techniques target testing programs written in general-purpose programming languages, where a small scale of inter-context interleaving between program executions may make these techniques inapplicable. We observe that nesC blocks new context interleaving when handling interrupts, and this feature significantly restricts the scale of inter-context interleaving that may occur in a nesC application. This paper models how operations on different contexts may interleave as inter-context flow graphs. Based on these graphs, it proposes two test adequacy criteria, one on inter-context data-flows and another on inter-context control-flows. It evaluates the proposal by a real-life open-source nesC application. The empirical results show that the new criteria detect significantly more failures than their conventional counterparts.