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CASA: An Approach for Exposing and Documenting Concurrency-Related Software Properties

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Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13511))

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Abstract

Finding concurrency bugs is hard because of two reasons. Reconstruction of concurrency-specific software properties from source code or binary is an NP-hard problem, and some information might not be present in the software implementation at all (e.g., intentions of synchronisation). Existing approaches for finding concurrency bugs use over-approximating analyses and testing, but these respectively often lead to potential false warnings or fail to report some concurrency bugs. Without knowledge of concurrency properties (memory locations shared between threads and used synchronisation mechanisms), it is hard to complement existing analyses and make their output more precise. Furthermore, choosing a testing tool without knowledge of concurrency-specific software properties is also a challenge and can result in big overhead.

Therefore, in this paper we present a light-weight approach that forces developers to plan and document decisions about used synchronisation mechanisms during development. The approach is implemented as part of Agile SCRUM framework. Documented concurrency-related decisions are used to choose adequate testing tools and improve their precision.

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through grant reference EP/P020011/1.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to ACM template for Questionnaire Surveys - www.acmsigsoft.github.io/EmpiricalStandards/docs/?standard=QuestionnaireSurveys.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Jasmin Jahić

  2. Siemens AG, Fuerth, Germany

    Volkan Doganci & Hubert Gehring

Authors
  1. Jasmin Jahić
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  2. Volkan Doganci
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  3. Hubert Gehring
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Correspondence to Jasmin Jahić , Volkan Doganci or Hubert Gehring .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Alex Orailoglu

  2. BTU-Cottbus Senftenberg, Cottbus, Germany

    Marc Reichenbach

  3. Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Matthias Jung

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Jahić, J., Doganci, V., Gehring, H. (2022). CASA: An Approach for Exposing and Documenting Concurrency-Related Software Properties. In: Orailoglu, A., Reichenbach, M., Jung, M. (eds) Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation. SAMOS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13511. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15074-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15074-6_9

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