Ballerina: Automatic generation and clustering of efficient random unit tests for multithreaded code

Testing multithreaded code is hard and expensive. A multithreaded unit test creates two or more threads, each executing one or more methods on shared objects of the class under test. Such unit tests can be generated at random, but basic random generation produces tests that are either slow or do not trigger concurrency bugs. Worse, such tests have many false alarms, which require human effort to filter out. We present Ballerina, a novel technique for automated random generation of efficient multithreaded tests that effectively trigger concurrency bugs. Ballerina makes tests efficient by having only two threads, each executing a single, randomly selected method. Ballerina increases chances that such simple parallel code finds bugs by appending it to more complex, randomly generated sequential code. We also propose a clustering technique to reduce the manual effort in inspecting failures of automatically generated multithreaded tests. We evaluate Ballerina on 14 real-world bugs from six popular codebases: Groovy, JDK, JFreeChart, Apache Log4j, Apache Lucene, and Apache Pool. The experiments show that tests generated by Ballerina find bugs on average 2×-10× faster than basic random generation, and our clustering technique reduces the number of inspected failures on average 4×-8×. Using Ballerina, we found three previously unknown bugs, two of which were already confirmed and fixed.