Keynote Talk : Concurrency Unit Testing with Coyote (18/05/202, 09am-10am UTC+1)

Portrait of Akash Lal Akash Lal
Microsoft Research

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ABSTRACT:

Concurrency is fundamental for building scalable software systems. Despite the prevalence of such systems, testing them remains an uncomfortable problem for developers. Concurrency bugs are hard to find, reproduce and fix, and for most part, they get ignored in standard industry practices. Controlled concurrency testing (CCT) techniques aim to offer a solution, where a scheduler explores the space of possible interleavings of a concurrent program looking for bugs. Since the set of possible interleavings is typically very large, these schedulers employ heuristics that prioritize the search to “interesting” subspaces.

In this talk, I will describe the evolution of the open-source Coyote tool for testing C# applications. Coyote has been downloaded around a million times, and is used routinely for testing several Azure services. The talk will cover the architecture of the tool, specialized scheduling techniques, such as the use of reinforcement learning to find bugs, and also the experience of using it in production.

BIOGRAPHY: Akash Lal is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He works broadly in the area of programming languages. His interests are in language design, compiler implementation and program analysis targeted towards helping developers deal with the complexity of modern software. At Microsoft, Akash has worked on the verification engine behind Microsoft’s Static Driver Verifier tool that has won multiple best-paper awards. More recently, he has been working on project Coyote for building highly-reliable asynchronous systems. Akash completed his PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison and jointly received the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis.

Dates

February 29 ,2024 March 11 ,2024

Abstract submission deadline

March 7 ,2024 March 18 ,2024

Paper submission deadline

April 22 ,2024

Accept/Reject notification

May 12 ,2024

Camera ready copy due

May 27-28 ,2024

Metis Spring school

May 29-31 ,2024

Netys Conference

Proceedings

Revised selected papers will be published as a post-proceedings in Springer's LNCS "Lecture Notes in Computer Science"

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