Detail

Finding Concurrent Bugs Before Your Customers

It started six years ago when some colleagues spent half a man year
on
debugging a single “simple” bug. The main problem was that this bug
appeared very rarely and was therefore very hard to locate. This
frustration led to a technology called ConTest whose aim is to make
intermittent bugs more likely to appear and to be able to repeat
execution that exhibit these bugs. The talk starts by presenting the
difficulties of testing multi-threaded programs and showing typical
timing related bugs. We then show how to find such bugs. We start by
presenting the common concurrent bug patterns and how to use them.
Then
explain about review for concurrent bugs. The concepts of ConTest –
an
application that makes the discovery of such bugs easier by changing
the
relative timing of the threads – is presented. Next we demonstrate
how
ConTest is used and some of its useful features.