Title
Combining unit-level symbolic execution and system-level concrete execution for testing nasa software
Abstract
We describe an approach to testing complex safety critical software that combines unit-level symbolic execution and system-level concrete execution for generating test cases that satisfy user-specified testing criteria. We have developed Symbolic Java PathFinder, a symbolic execution framework that implements a non-standard bytecode interpreter on top of the Java PathFinder model checking tool. The framework propagates the symbolic information via attributes associated with the program data. Furthermore, we use two techniques that leverage system-level concrete program executions to gather information about a unit's input to improve the precision of the unit-level test case generation. We applied our approach to testing a prototype NASA flight software component. Our analysis helped discover a serious bug that resulted in design changes to the software. Although we give our presentation in the context of a NASA project, we believe that our work is relevant for other critical systems that require thorough testing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1390630.1390635
ISSTA
Keywords
Field
DocType
symbolic information,user-specified testing criterion,system-level concrete execution,nasa project,unit-level symbolic execution,symbolic execution framework,prototype nasa flight software,java pathfinder model checking,critical software,thorough testing,nasa software,software component,system testing,model checking,satisfiability,unit testing
Test harness,Programming language,Computer science,White-box testing,Regression testing,Theoretical computer science,Real-time computing,Software reliability testing,Symbolic execution,Concolic testing,Keyword-driven testing,Symbolic trajectory evaluation
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
135
5.13
26
Authors
7
Search Limit
100135
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Corina S. Pasareanu12903161.48
Peter C. Mehlitz22379.28
David H. Bushnell32117.59
Karen Gundy-Burlet41506.81
Michael Lowry523197.94
Suzette Person658327.41
Mark Pape71355.13