STORM static unit checking of concurrent programs

• Published in: 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering Vol. 2; pp. 519 - 520
• Main Author: Rakamaric, Z.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.05.2010; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Complexity theory; Computer bugs; Concurrent computing; concurrent programs; Context; Hardware > Hardware validation > Functional verification > Assertion checking; Software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Formal software verification; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods; static analysis; Storms; Testing; Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Assertions; unit checking; static analysis; concurrent programs; unit checking
• ISBN: 9781605587196; 1605587192
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/1810295.1810460

Concurrency is inherent in today's software. Unexpected interactions between concurrently executing threads often cause subtle bugs in concurrent programs. Such bugs are hard to discover using traditional testing techniques since they require executing a program on a particular unit test (i.e. input) through a particular thread interleaving. A promising solution to this problem is static program analysis since it can simultaneously check a concurrent program on all inputs as well as through all possible thread interleavings. This paper describes a scalable, automatic, and precise approach to static unit checking of concurrent programs implemented in a tool called Storm. Storm has been applied on a number of real-world Windows device drivers, and the tool found a previously undiscovered concurrency bug in a driver from Microsoft's Driver Development Kit.