About CHESS – Finding and Reproducing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs

Latest CHESS release: Major features in the new release of CHESS (v0.1.30610.2, 06/12/2009) include: Data race detection for managed code; ChessBoard, an interactive shell for CHESS that simplifies the typical user interactions with CHESS, such as launching CHESS runs and managing test results; and Refinement checking for comparing the observed concurrent behaviors of a concurrent data type with its observable serial behaviors.

Given a concurrent test, CHESS repeatedly runs the test so that every run takes a different thread interleaving. On finding an error, CHESS reproduces the erroneous interleaving, tremendously improving the debugging experience. CHESS can find assertion violations, deadlocks, livelocks, data-races, and memory-model errors. CHESS includes a visualization tool for viewing thread interleavings for better concurrency debugging.

CHESS works for unmanaged user-mode programs and for managed programs. CHESS is designed to be used by both developers and testers of concurrent programs. Unlike stress-testing, CHESS does not need lots of threads to create interleaving variety. The users get the most benefit from CHESS by providing a test with small number of threads (say, less than 10) exercising a single concurrency scenario.

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Madan Musuvathi - Getting started with CHESS in Visual Studio 2008