Today we have put the ISSTA 2011 program online. This year, ISSTA received an all-time high number of submissions and we also accepted an all-time high number of excellent research papers. They should surely make for an interesting program.
Also, registration is open now. We hope to see you there!
ISSTA Program is online, registration is open
Eric | May 11, 2011Aspect-oriented Race Detection in Java
Eric | September 3, 2010Our paper on Aspect-oriented Race Detection in Java (joint work with Klaus Havelund from NASA JPL) is now available on the TSE website and here. It’s part of a TSE special issue on best papers from ISSTA 2008.
The paper enhances the approach presented at ISSTA to also take thread spawns and joins into account. This addresses an omission in the original algorithm raised by Bill Pugh during the ISSTA conference.
Abstract:
In the past researchers have developed specialized programs to aid programmers detecting concurrent programming errors such as deadlocks, livelocks, starvation and data races. In this work we propose a language extension to the aspect-oriented programming language AspectJ, in the form of three new pointcuts, lock(), unlock() and maybeShared(). These pointcuts allow programmers to monitor program events where locks are granted or handed back, and where values are accessed that may be shared amongst multiple Java threads. We decide thread-locality using a static thread-local-objects analysis developed by others. Using the three new primitive pointcuts, researchers can directly implement efficient monitoring algorithms to detect concurrent-programming errors online. As an example, we describe a new algorithm which we call RACER, an adaption of the well-known ERASER algorithm to the memory model of Java. We implemented the new pointcuts as an extension to the AspectBench Compiler, implemented the RACER algorithm using this language extension and then applied the algorithm to the NASA K9 Rover Executive and two smaller programs. Our experiments demonstrate that our implementation is effective in finding subtle data races. In the Rover Executive RACER finds 12 data races, with no false warnings. Only one of these races was previously known.
ISSTA 2011
Eric | July 27, 2010As publicity chair for ISSTA 2011, it is my pleasure to invite you all to Toronto, Ontario for July 17th-21st, 2011.
Toronto promises to be an exciting venue and our excellent program committee will certainly do its best to provide an great program. However, a conference is nothing without strong research papers! You are invited to submit technical papers describing original research in testing or analysis of computer software. Papers describing theoretical or empirical research, new techniques, or in-depth case studies of testing and analysis methods and tools are welcome.
You can download the full call for papers on the right. Workshop proposals are due Friday, November 19, 2011 and research papers on Friday, February 4, 2011.
Finally, if you wish to promote ISSTA yourself, you can download a web banner here.
Protected: Von Microsoft, Seattle und der ISSTA Konferenz
Eric | August 17, 2008ISSTA 2008 recap
Eric | August 11, 2008This is a small recap of ISSTA 2008. It’s a little belated but I thought better late than never.
Defects workshop
On Sunday I attended Defects’08 which was the first (!) International Workshop on Defects in Large Software Systems. The group of people was kind of interesting in the sense that I knew nobody in person when I got there. The primary may have been that there is a subtle difference between detecting software “defects” (which they focus on) and “API violations” (which I focus on): When looking for program points where API specifications are violated then your are given a specification. Therefore any usage of the API that does not conform with that specification is –by definition– an error, even if nothing bad actually happens.
Racer paper wins SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Eric | July 23, 2008Klaus and I are happy to announce that our paper on Racer, a dynamic race detection approach to Java, has just won an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at this year’s ISSTA conference. Thanks! (clap)
In the city of coffee
Eric | July 19, 2008After yesterday’s exciting day at Microsoft Research (thanks to Manuel Fähndrich!) in Bellevue, a little city some miles away from Redmond that, funny enough, people from Seattle apparently call Bellview. I have just arrived in Seattle for ISSTA. This after noon I spent at the Museum of Flight, together with Patrick Lam and some friends of his. Of course I also saw the first Starbucks. Interestingly, Starbucks is having a very hard competition here – no wonder, considering their prices. Pike Market is also kinda interesting but really very much of a tourist trap. Lunch at the Steelhead Diner was good but did not quite match personal taste.
ISSTA will be taking place in the Hilton, which is (as so many Hilton hotels) plain ugly from the outside but very beautiful from the inside. The photo shows the awesome view out of my room. More photos of Seattle are in my gallery.
Off to Seattle
Eric | July 17, 2008I’ll be off to Seattle for the next week, presenting at Microsoft and attending ISSTA to present my paper on Racer. From what I’ve heard, Seattle is supposed to be quite beautiful, especially around this time of the year. I’ll tell you next week, so stay tuned 😉