Addressing State Explosion in Discovery of Concurrency Errors in Component Java Code

Current approaches to the development of reliable software systems include decomposition into components, attaching formal behavior specification to the components, and verification of component behavior via model checking. The main obstacle preventing model checking real-life software components is state explosion, which occurs especially for highly parallel components. In addition, since a typical model checker (e.g. Java PathFinder) checks only complete programs, it is necessary to create an artificial environment for each isolated component. We present a technique that addresses state explosion in discovery of concurrency errors in component Java code with Java PathFinder. The key idea is to reduce parallelism in a component environment to preserve parallel execution only for methods that interact with each other via concurrency-related constructs of the Java language those methods and the degree of interaction between them are determined by a metric. Benefits of the proposed technique are illustrated by results of experiments performed on several real-life software components. In particular, the technique makes discovery of concurrency errors with Java PathFinder possible in limited memory and reasonable time.