Griffin: grouping suspicious memory-access patterns to improve understanding of concurrency bugs

This paper presents Griffin, a new fault-comprehension technique. Griffin provides a way to explain concurrency bugs using additional information over existing fault-localization techniques, and thus, bridges the gap between fault- localization and fault-fixing techniques. Griffin inputs a list of memory-access patterns and a coverage matrix, groups those patterns responsible for the same concurrency bug, and outputs the grouped patterns along with suspicious methods and bug graphs. Griffin is the first technique that handles multiple concurrency bugs. This paper also describes the implementation of Griffin in Java and C++, and shows the empirical evaluation of Griffin on a set of subjects. The results show that, for our subjects, Griffin clusters failing executions and memory-access patterns for the same bug with few false positives, provides suspicious methods that contain the locations to be fixed, and runs efficiently.