Study Of Concurrent Programs Testing Technology Based On Mutation

One approach to testing concurrent programs is called reachability testing, which can automatically generate every partially ordered synchronized sequence exactly once without need to save and search the test history. The sequence of synchronization events exercised by reachability testing can detect the faults of sequence programs, however it can’t effectively detect the synchronized faults about concurrent mutation operators in concurrent programs. This paper presents a new technique to improve the ability of detection synchronization faults by splitting strategy. Our technique splits the method’code segments to generate more fine-grained synchronization sequences. Based on the characteristic of synchronization faults we introduce the program analysis technique such as program slicing technique to analyze the related statements, and then get the shared variables and the condition synchronization information about the program. After that, we propose approachs about how to choose the split point and sort the candidate split points.We have implemented our concurrent program testing technique as a prototype tool SplitRichTest and compare it with the traditional reachability testing tool RichTest and the concurrency faults prediction tool Pecan. We conclude that the improved SplitRichTest tool which based on the split strategy can detect the synchronization faults in the concurrent programs effectively. The experimental results are as follows:(1)SplitRichTest’ error detection rate is 97.5% while RichTest can only detect 68.4% errors, Pecan can only detect 68.7% errors. (2) The splitting points sorting strategies are effective, we apply spliting strategy on the 106 mutants that can’t be killed by RichTest, we find that about 70.8% mutants among thoese can be detected at the first split point by the sorting algorithm of split points.