Result: Identification and Annotation of Concurrency Design Patterns in Java Source Code using Static Analysis

Concurrent software is quickly becoming a very important facet in Software Engineering due to numerous advantages, one of which is increased processing speed. Despite it’s importance, concurrent software is fraught with very difficult to detect bugs, for example deadlocks and data races. Concurrency design patterns were created to offer successfully tried and tested means to design and develop concurrent software to, amongst other things, minimize the occurrence of these hard to detect bugs. In this thesis we discuss our novel static analysis technique to detect these concurrency design patterns in Java source code and identify them using commented Java annotations. Using our technique the commented Java annotations are inserted above Java constructs that are not only part of the Java source code but also make up the various roles that comprise the concurrency design pattern. The identifying of the concurrency design patterns in the Java source code can aid in their maintenance later on, by matching the inserted Java annotations to the various Java constructs they are annotating. Maintaining the concurrency design patterns within the Java source code in effect aids in maintaining the Java source code error free.