Fully automatic and precise detection of thread safety violations

Abstract

Concurrent, object-oriented programs often use thread-safe library classes. Existing techniques for testing a thread-safe class either rely on tests using the class, on formal specifications, or on both. Unfortunately, these techniques often are not fully automatic as they involve the user in analyzing the output. This paper presents an automatic testing technique that reveals concurrency bugs in supposedly thread-safe classes. The analysis requires as input only the class under test and reports only true positives. The key idea is to generate tests in which multiple threads call methods on a shared instance of the tested class. If a concurrent test exhibits an exception or a deadlock that cannot be triggered in any linearized execution of the test, the analysis reports a thread safety violation. The approach is easily applicable, because it is independent of hand-written tests and explicit specifications. The analysis finds 15 concurrency bugs in popular Java libraries, including two previously unknown bugs in the Java standard library.