A Uniform Classification of Common Concurrency Errors

Nowadays, multi-threaded programs are quite common and so are concurrency-related errors. Many works devoted to detection of concurrency errors have been published in recent years, and many of them presented definitions of concurrency errors that the proposed algorithms are able to handle. These definitions are usually expressed in different terms suitable for a description of the particular considered algorithms, and they surprisingly often differ from each other in the meaning they assign to particular errors. To help understanding the errors and developing techniques for detecting them, this paper strives to provide a uniform taxonomy of concurrency errors common in current programs, with a stress on those written in Java, together with a brief overview of techniques so far proposed for detecting such errors.