How Good is Static Analysis at Finding Concurrency Bugs?

by Devin Kester, Martin Mwebesa, Jeremy S. Bradbury

Abstract

Detecting bugs in concurrent software is challenging due to the many different thread interleavings. Dynamic analysis and testing solutions to bug detection are often costly as they need to provide coverage of the interleaving space in addition to traditional black box or white box coverage. An alternative to dynamic analysis detection of concurrency bugs is the use of static analysis. This paper examines the use of three static analysis tools (FindBugs, JLint and Chord) in order to assess each tool’s ability to find concurrency bugs and to identify the percentage of spurious results produced. The empirical data presented is based on an experiment involving 12 concurrent Java programs.

Bibliographic Information [Bibtex format]

@inproceedings{KMB10,
Author = {Devin Kester and Martin Mwebesa and Jeremy S. Bradbury},
Title = {How Good is Static Analysis at Finding Concurrency Bugs?},
Booktitle = {Proc. of the 10th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2010)},
Pages = {115-124},
Month = {Sept.},
Year = {2010}}

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