Toward Automatic Concurrent Debugging Via Minimal Program Mutant Generation with AspectJ

Abstract

Debugging is one of the most time-consuming activities in program design. Work on automatic debugging has received a great deal of attention and there are a number of symposiums dedicated to this field. Automatic debugging is usually invoked when a test fails in one situation, but succeeds in another. For example, a test fails in one version of the program (or scheduler), but succeeds in another. Automatic debugging searches for the smallest difference that causes the failure. This is very useful when working to identify and fix the root cause of the bug. A new testing method instruments concurrent programs with schedule-modifying instructions to reveal concurrent bugs. This method is designed to increase the probability of concurrent bugs (such as races, deadlocks) appearing. This paper discusses integrating this new testing technology with automatic debugging. Instead of just showing that a bug exists, we can pinpoint its location by finding the minimal set of instrumentations that reveal the bug. In addition to explaining a methodology for this integration, we show an AspectJ-based implementation. We discuss the implementation in detail as it both demonstrates the advantage of the adaptability of open source tools and how our specific change can be used for other testing tools. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.