Cross-project concurrency bug prediction using domain-adversarial neural network

Abstract

In recent years, software bug prediction has shown to be effective in narrowing down the potential bug modules and boosting the efficiency and precision of existing testing and analysis tools. However, due to its non-deterministic nature and low presence, concurrency bug labeling is a challenging task, which limits the implementation of within-project concurrency bug prediction. This paper proposes DACon, a Domain-Adversarial neural network-based cross-project Concurrency bug prediction approach to tackle this problem by leveraging information from another related project. By combining a set of designed concurrency code metrics with widely used sequential code metrics, DACon uses SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique) and domain-adversarial neural network to mitigate two challenges including the severe class imbalance between concurrency bug-prone samples and concurrency bug-free samples, and shift between source and target distribution during bug prediction implementation. Our evaluation on 20 pair-wise groups of experiments constructed from 5 real-world projects indicates that cross-project concurrency bug prediction is feasible, and DACon can effectively predict concurrency bugs across different projects.