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Erasing Race Conditions


Coverity’s static analysis tools attempt to automate defect testing

By David Worthington
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January 15, 2008 —  Coverity again is helping to unwind the intricacies of multithreaded applications and make testing for concurrency defects more automated and less like threading a needle.

An update to Coverity Prevent SQS (Software Quality System), released Dec. 11, introduces concurrency defect detection capabilities for C, C++ and Java applications. The new technology identifies deadlocks, race conditions and thread blocks that may lead to application bottlenecks and failures, or information loss.

An interface was added to help developers understand the interleavings that exist in multithreaded applications and manifest the possible executions of a parallel program.

Coverity’s chief technology officer Ben Chelf explained that Prevent SQS uses deep interprocedural analysis to understand how locks that protect access points in parallel programming are acquired in a codebase. That ability is coupled with Coverity’s SAT (as in Boolean Satisfiability) engine to reduce instances of false positives.

The SAT engine—concerned with whether a Boolean expression has a solution—debuted in September 2007 as a complement to the company’s data flow analysis engine.

Chelf said that the advantage of using static analysis to test for concurrency defects is that developers do not need to worry about the particulars of scheduling while testing. “It removes dependence on scheduling variables,” he said.

“To remain competitive, software companies need to support multicore hardware, which will make multithreaded applications inevitable for most developers,” Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke, said in a prepared statement. “The challenge for developers is that multithreaded applications add complexity to the application life cycle, requiring new expertise and technology to maintain application quality and security.”





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