An approach to concurrent Java programs debugging and run-time analysis: technical report no. DCSE/TR-2003-14

With increasing power of today’s computers, the Java programming language is more and more chosen by developers as the implementation language of various types of software. The wide range of applications also include concurrent multithreaded programs. However, programming, analyzing and testing concurrent programs is a problem of a higher order than programming and testing classic sequential programs, even if they are implemented at a high level of abstraction that Java provides. The purpose of this work is to describe an approach to concurrent Java programs debugging and run-time analysis done by means of a simulator of a subset of the JVM functionality and a converter of Java source code. The tested pro- gram can be deterministicly traced (just one thread at once) at run-time and the relationships of various entities can be observed and analyzed. As a consequence, the programmer can find potential bugs concerning concurrency issues in a shorter time than when using standard debugging and tracing techniques, usually inefficient for concurrent programs. This paper first summarizes some requirements that a tool implementing this approach should meet, then it presents work related to concurrent programs testing and analysis, done worldwide. Subsequently, it discusses an invented state-space model of concurrent Java programs and a controller based on it, executing the tested program. Finally, it shows how Java programs are transformed in order to use the controller. Chapter 6 concludes the document