CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool

Posted By: Charles | Dec 10th, 2008 @ 1:46 PM | 62,772 Views | 15 Comments
CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurrent test cases and is therefore easy to deploy. Both developers and testers should find CHESS useful. The CHESS architecture is described in this technical report.

Here, we meet some of the researchers behind CHESS, Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer. Joining in the conversation are two software test engineers extraordinare, Chris Dern and Rahul Patil. Chris and Rahul use CHESS as part of their daily routine of finding bugs in the various technologies that power Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. Tune in and learn about this great technology from the folks who know it best.
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#Jan 7th @ 1:21 PM
Madan Musuvathi
Madan Musuvathi
Hi Chris,
 CHESS is specifically designed for a the unit-testing scenario. Thus, you cannot apply it "out-of-the-box" on existing long-running programs. In return, CHESS can give you guaranteed coverage of interleavings.
 A lot of folks have given similar feedback saying that they would rather give up coverage guarantees if they dont have to refactor their existing tests. we are working on a tool called Cuzz that would serve that purpose. Cuzz would work very much like AppVerifier and you can attach it to any EXE or a windows service.

madan
#Jan 7th @ 1:22 PM
Madan Musuvathi
Madan Musuvathi
Yup, CHESS is not there yet. We are working on a modified version of CHESS that works like App Verifier - you can attach it to any EXE or a daemon
#Jan 12th @ 7:03 AM
MadHatter
MadHatter


In the video, there is mention that CHESS works with both managed and unmanaged code.   I downloaded and install CHESS and only see unmanaged code samples.   How does CHESS work with managed code?   Will the team be providing C# samples sometime soon?  The whiteboard explaination really help me better understand the functionality provided by CHESS.   It would be great to see this implemented in a way which does not require any instrumentation of code and could instead by attached to a running process which could be used by a QA team.  Keep up the good work!

#Jan 14th @ 4:43 PM
Tom ball
Tom ball
Yes. But for the moment, please try out our recent release of CHESS (just live today):


CHESS is available for download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950526.aspx. CHESS is a tool from Microsoft Research for finding and reproducing concurrency errors. Please download the bits and let us know what you think in our forum. Also, subscribe to our blog for more details and tidbits.

#May 17th @ 7:54 AM
Alexander Korol
Alexander Korol

Is CHESS able to track context swtiches in new coming Parallel Framework (aka PFX). It seems that due to parallel framework operates with own pool of threads and own scheduling - CHESS it is not applicable in the case of Parallel Framework scheduled Tasks. Thanks.

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