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Finding race conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE

Authors:

Nicholas Smallbone,

Ulf WigerAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '09: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 149 - 160

https://doi.org/10.1145/1596550.1596574

Published: 31 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We address the problem of testing and debugging concurrent, distributed Erlang applications. In concurrent programs, race conditions are a common class of bugs and are very hard to find in practice. Traditional unit testing is normally unable to help finding all race conditions, because their occurrence depends so much on timing. Therefore, race conditions are often found during system testing, where due to the vast amount of code under test, it is often hard to diagnose the error resulting from race conditions. We present three tools (QuickCheck, PULSE, and a visualizer) that in combination can be used to test and debug concurrent programs in unit testing with a much better possibility of detecting race conditions. We evaluate our method on an industrial concurrent case study and illustrate how we find and analyze the race conditions.

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Cited By

Hansen TBrady EAlves SCockx J(2024)Type-Level Property Based TestingProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development10.1145/3678000.3678206(37-49)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678000.3678206
Bueso de Barrio LFredlund LBenac Earle CHerranz ÁMariño JFernandez-Reyes KVoinea A(2024)Controlled Scheduling of Concurrent Elixir ProgramsProceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3677995.3678195(67-75)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677995.3678195
Bueso de Barrio LFredlund LHerranz ÁMariño JBenac Earle C(2024)Executable contracts for elixirJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.101019(101019)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.101019
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Index Terms

Finding race conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP '09: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

August 2009

364 pages

ISBN:9781605583327

DOI:10.1145/1596550

General Chair:
Graham Hutton
University of Nottingham
,
Program Chair:
Andrew Tolmach
Portland State University

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 9
ICFP '09
September 2009
343 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1631687
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 31 August 2009

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ICFP '09

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ICFP '09: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

August 31 - September 2, 2009

Edinburgh, Scotland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

Hansen TBrady EAlves SCockx J(2024)Type-Level Property Based TestingProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development10.1145/3678000.3678206(37-49)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678000.3678206
Bueso de Barrio LFredlund LBenac Earle CHerranz ÁMariño JFernandez-Reyes KVoinea A(2024)Controlled Scheduling of Concurrent Elixir ProgramsProceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3677995.3678195(67-75)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677995.3678195
Bueso de Barrio LFredlund LHerranz ÁMariño JBenac Earle C(2024)Executable contracts for elixirJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.101019(101019)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.101019
Lami PLanese IStefani JSacerdoti Coen CFabbretti G(2024)Reversible debugging of concurrent Erlang programs: Supporting imperative primitivesJournal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944(100944)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.100944
Chen ZRizkallah CO'Connor LSusarla PKlein GHeiser GKeller GFischer BBurgueño LCazzola W(2022)Property-Based Testing: Climbing the Stairway to VerificationProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3567512.3567520(84-97)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567512.3567520
O'Connor LWickström OJhala RDillig I(2022)Quickstrom: property-based acceptance testing with LTL specificationsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523728(1025-1038)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519939.3523728
Yuan XYang JLarus JCeze LStrauss K(2020)Effective Concurrency Testing for Distributed SystemsProceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3373376.3378484(1141-1156)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373376.3378484
Aichernig BBauerstätter PJöbstl EKann SKorošec RKrenn WMateis CSchlick RSchumi R(2019)Learning and statistical model checking of system response timesSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-018-9432-827:2(757-795)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-018-9432-8
Aichernig BKann SSchumi R(2018)Statistical Model Checking of Response Times for Different System DeploymentsDependable Software Engineering. Theories, Tools, and Applications10.1007/978-3-319-99933-3_11(153-169)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99933-3_11
Walker MRunciman C(2018)Cheap Remarks About Concurrent ProgramsFunctional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_17(264-279)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_17
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