Characterizing and taming non-deterministic bugs in JavaScript applications
Author: 
Jie WangAuthors Info & Claims
Abstract
JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages for both client-side and server-side applications. In JavaScript applications, events may be generated, triggered and consumed non-deterministically. Thus, JavaScript applications may suffer from non-deterministic bugs, when events are triggered and consumed in an unexpected order. In this proposal, we aim to characterize and combat non-deterministic bugs in JavaScript applications. Specifically, we first perform a comprehensive study about real-world non-deterministic bugs in server-side JavaScript applications. In order to facilitate bug diagnosis, we further propose approaches to isolate the necessary events that are responsible for the occurrence of a failure. We also plan to design new techniques in detecting non-deterministic bugs in JavaScript applications.
References
[1]
“Developer Survey Results 2016.” {Online}. Available: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016.
[2]
“New Node.js Foundation Survey Reports New ‘Full Stack’ In Demand Among Enterprise Developers.” {Online}. Available: https://nodejs.org/uk/blog/announcements/nodejs-foundation-survey/.
[3]
J. Mickens, J. Elson, and J. Howell, “Mugshot : Deterministic Capture and Replay for JavaScript Applications,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation(NSDI), 2010, pp. 159–174.
[4]
J. Davis, A. Thekumparampil, and D. Lee, “Node.fz: Fuzzing the Server-Side Event-Driven Architecture,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems(EuroSys), 2017, pp. 145–160.
[5]
J. Wang, W. Dou, G. Yu, G. Chushu, Q. Feng, and W. Jun, “A Comprehensive Study on Real World Concurrency Bugs in Node.js,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2017.
[6]
J. Wang, W. Dou, C. Gao, and J. Wei, “Fast Reproducing Web Application Errors,” in Preceedings of International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering(ISSRE), 2015, pp. 530–540.
[7]
J. Wang, “Constraint-Based Event Trace Reduction,” in Preceedings of ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering(FSE16-SRC), 2016, pp. 1106–1108.
[8]
F. S. Ocariza, K. Pattabiraman, and B. Zorn, “JavaScript Errors in the Wild: An Empirical Study,” in Proceedings of International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering(ISSRE), 2011, pp. 100–109.
[9]
F. S. Ocariza, K. Bajaj, K. Pattabiraman, and A. Mesbah, “A Study of Causes and Consequences of Client-Side JavaScript Bugs,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 128–144, 2016.
[10]
F. Ocariza, K. Bajaj, K. Pattabiraman, and A. Mesbah, “An Empirical Study of Client-side JavaScript Bugs,” in Preceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement(ESEM), 2013, pp. 55–64.
[11]
S. Lu, S. Park, E. Seo, and Y. Zhou, “Learning from Mistakes - A Comprehensive Study on Real World Concurrency Bug Characteristics,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems(ASPLOS), 2008, pp. 329–339.
[12]
T. Leesatapornwongsa, J. F. Lukman, S. Lu, and H. S. Gunawi, “TaxDC:A Taxonomy of Non-Deterministic Concurrency Bugs in Datacenter Distributed Systems,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems(ASPLOS), 2016, pp. 517–530.
[13]
P. Bielik, V. Raychev, and M. Vechev, “Scalable Race Detection for Android Applications,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications(OOPSLA), 2015, pp. 332–348.
[14]
C.-H. Hsiao, J. Yu, S. Narayanasamy, Z. Kong, C. L. Pereira, G. A. Pokam, P. M. Chen, and J. Flinn, “Race Detection for Event-driven Mobile Applications,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 326– 336, 2014.
[15]
B. Petrov, M. Vechev, M. Sridharan, and J. Dolby, “Race Detection for Web Applications,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2012, pp. 251–262.
[16]
W. Wang, Y. Zheng, P. Liu, L. Xu, X. Zhang, and P. Eugster, “ARROW : Automated Repair of Races on Client-Side Web Pages,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis(ISSTA), 2016, pp. 201–212.
[17]
Y. Zheng and X. Zhang, “Static Detection of Resource Contention Problems in Server-Side Scripts,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2012, pp. 584–594.
[18]
K. H. Lee, Y. Zheng, N. Sumner, and X. Zhang, “Toward Generating Reducible Replay Logs,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2011, pp. 246–257.
[19]
X. Zhang, S. Tallam, and R. Gupta, “Dynamic Slicing Long Running Programs Through Execution Fast Forwarding,” in Proceedings of ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2006, pp. 81–91.
[20]
A. Zeller and R. Hildebrandt, “Simplifying and Isolating Failure-inducing Input,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 183–200, 2002.
[21]
G. Misherghi and Z. Su, “HDD: Hierarchical Delta Debugging,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering(ICSE), 2006, pp. 142–151.
[22]
M. Hammoudi, B. Burg, G. Bae, and G. Rothermel, “On the Use of Delta Debugging to Reduce Recordings and Facilitate Debugging of Web Applications,” in Proceedings of Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software (ESEC/FSE), 2015, pp. 333–344.
[23]
G. Pinto, W. Torres, and F. Castor, “A Study on the Most Popular Questions about Concurrent Programming,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools, 2015, pp. 39–46.
[24]
M. Yu, Y.-S. Ma, and D.-H. Bae, “Characterizing Non-deadlock Concurrency Bug Fixes in Open-source Java Programs,” in Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing(SAC), 2016, pp. 1534–1537.
[25]
G. Li, E. Andreasen, and I. Ghosh, “SymJS: Automatic Symbolic Testing of JavaScript Web Applications,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering(FSE), 2014, pp. 449–459.
Recommendations
A comprehensive study on real world concurrency bugs in Node.js
ASE '17: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software EngineeringNode.js becomes increasingly popular in building server-side JavaScript applications. It adopts an event-driven model, which supports asynchronous I/O and non-deterministic event processing. This asynchrony and non-determinism can introduce intricate ...
Discovering bug patterns in JavaScript
FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software EngineeringJavaScript has become the most popular language used by developers for client and server side programming. The language, however, still lacks proper support in the form of warnings about potential bugs in the code. Most bug finding tools in use today ...
Journey to find bugs in JavaScript web applications in the wild
ICFP '16Analyzing real-world JavaScript web applications is a challenging task. On top of understanding the semantics of JavaScript, it requires modeling of web documents, platform objects, and interactions between them. Not only the JavaScript language itself ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
October 2017
1033 pages
ISBN:9781538626849
- General Chair:
- Grigore Rosu,
- Program Chairs:
- Massimiliano Di Penta,
- Tien N. Nguyen
Sponsors
Publisher
IEEE Press
Publication History
Published: 30 October 2017
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Article
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 219Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)81
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
Reflects downloads up to 05 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in