An automatically-generated run-time instrumenter to reduce coverage testing overhead

J. Jenny Li, David M. Weiss, Howell Yee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008 Co-located Workshops - Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST 2008
Pages49-56
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event3rd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST 2008, held in Conjunction with the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008 - Leipzig, Germany
Duration: 11 May 200811 May 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference3rd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, AST 2008, held in Conjunction with the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2008
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityLeipzig
Period11/05/0811/05/08

Keywords

  • control flow graph
  • coverage testing
  • dominator analysis
  • program instrumentation

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