Analyzing and predicting concurrency bugs in open source systems

Background Software systems are relying more and more on multi-core hardware requiring a parallel approach to address the problems and improve performances. Unfortunately, parallel development is error prone and many developers are not very experienced with this paradigm also because identifying, reproducing, and fixing bugs is often difficult. Objective The main goal of this paper is the identification of an approach able to: (i) identify solved concurrency-related bugs to characterize them and help retrospective activities; (ii) identify concurrency-related bugs as soon as they are entered in the bug management system to support bug triage phase and allocate them to more experienced developers. Approach To this end, the paper analyzes bugs related to concurrency looking at their specific characteristics using different machine learning methods to automatically distinguish them from other kinds of bugs based on the data available in the issue tracking systems and in the code repositories. Results The overall best models we developed for Apache HTTP Server and MariaDB have a precision of 0.985 and 0.814 and a recall of 0.876 and 0.629 when considering linked bugs (bug reports information in bug repository and the corresponding fix in the version control system) and a precision of 0.978 and 0.779 and a recall of 0.889 and 0.569 when considering only the information from bug reports. Conclusions Such results allow the development of an automated system able to classify such bugs and support developers in the bug triage process.