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September 1, 2010

Speaker: Martin Mwebesa, MSc Student, Faculty of Science, Ontario Tech University

Title: How Good is Static Analysis at Finding Concurrency Bugs?

Abstract: Detecting bugs in concurrent software is challenging due to the many different thread interleavings. Dynamic analysis and testing solutions to bug detection are often costly as they need to provide coverage of the interleaving space in addition to traditional black box or white box coverage. An alternative to dynamic analysis detection of concurrency bugs is the use of static analysis. This paper examines the use of three static analysis tools (FindBugs, JLint and Chord) in order to assess each tool's ability to find concurrency bugs and to identify the percentage of spurious results produced. The empirical data presented is based on an experiment involving 12 concurrent Java programs.

Biography: Martin Mwebesa is a second year MSc student in Computer Science at Ontario Tech and is a member of the Software Quality Research Group. Martin's thesis research explores new techniques for maintaining concurrency design patterns and he is supervised by Dr. Jeremy Bradbury. In general, his research interests include design patterns, software testing, static analysis, model checking and concurrency.