A heuristic approach to path selection problem in concurrent program testing

Abstract

Repeated execution of a concurrent program with the same input may produce different sequence of rendezvous, thus making different output. The output of a concurrent program executed is determined by both the statements traversed by each task and the sequence of rendezvous. The traversed statements of each task constitute a task path, all task paths in an execution instance constitute a concurrent path. This paper proposes a new approach to generate all feasible concurrent paths from task path sets of a concurrent program. All possible rendezvous sequences of each feasible concurrent path are also generated. A heuristic approach is also proposed to select the suitable concurrent path set which satisfies node or branch coverage criterion.<>