Heuristics for finding concurrent bugs

Abstract

This paper presents new heuristics that increase the probability of manifesting concurrent bugs. The heuristics are based on cross-run monitoring. A contended shared variable is chosen and random context switching is performed at accesses to that variable. The relative strength of the new heuristics is analyzed. In comparison to previous works, our heuristics increase the frequency of bug manifestation. In addition, the new heuristics were able to find bugs that previous methods did not discover.