TY - GEN
T1 - An automatically-generated run-time instrumenter to reduce coverage testing overhead
AU - Li, J. Jenny
AU - Weiss, David M.
AU - Yee, Howell
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Coverage testing is often used as a quantified measurement of testing progress. One important issue of code coverage testing is the overhead of program execution monitoring that inserts probes into programs, either at run-time or off-line, to record program execution code coverage information (e.g., "1" for covered and "0" for not-covered). For time sensitive systems, such overhead may alter the program execution behavior or impact its performance, which is an even more critical problem for embedded systems where memory and CPU resources are limited. This paper proposes a new Super Nested Block (SNB) method to reduce instrumentation run-time overhead. The method improves upon two existing technologies: 1) program analysis for selecting instrumentation points, and 2) on-line run-time instrumentation eliminating repeated probes. We implemented the SNB method on an automatic generated on-line instrumenter of a code coverage testing tool and found that the instrumentation overhead was minor, less than 1% of overall execution time, and all real-time execution external behaviors were preserved.
AB - Coverage testing is often used as a quantified measurement of testing progress. One important issue of code coverage testing is the overhead of program execution monitoring that inserts probes into programs, either at run-time or off-line, to record program execution code coverage information (e.g., "1" for covered and "0" for not-covered). For time sensitive systems, such overhead may alter the program execution behavior or impact its performance, which is an even more critical problem for embedded systems where memory and CPU resources are limited. This paper proposes a new Super Nested Block (SNB) method to reduce instrumentation run-time overhead. The method improves upon two existing technologies: 1) program analysis for selecting instrumentation points, and 2) on-line run-time instrumentation eliminating repeated probes. We implemented the SNB method on an automatic generated on-line instrumenter of a code coverage testing tool and found that the instrumentation overhead was minor, less than 1% of overall execution time, and all real-time execution external behaviors were preserved.
KW - control flow graph
KW - coverage testing
KW - dominator analysis
KW - program instrumentation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960617719&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1370042.1370054
DO - 10.1145/1370042.1370054
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79960617719
SN - 9781605580302
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 49
EP - 56
BT - 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008 Co-located Workshops - Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST 2008
T2 - 3rd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST 2008, held in Conjunction with the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008
Y2 - 11 May 2008 through 11 May 2008
ER -