Paper Info
Title
Combining symbolic execution and search-based testing for programs with complex heap inputs.
Abstract
Despite the recent improvements in automatic test case generation, handling complex data structures as test inputs is still an open problem. Search-based approaches can generate sequences of method calls that instantiate structured inputs to exercise a relevant portion of the code, but fall short in building inputs to execute program elements whose reachability is determined by the structural features of the input structures themselves. Symbolic execution techniques can effectively handle structured inputs, but do not identify the sequences of method calls that instantiate the input structures through legal interfaces. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically generate test cases for programs with complex data structures as inputs. We use symbolic execution to generate path conditions that characterise the dependencies between the program paths and the input structures, and convert the path conditions to optimisation problems that we solve with search-based techniques to produce sequences of method calls that instantiate those inputs. Our preliminary results show that the approach is indeed effective in generating test cases for programs with complex data structures as inputs, thus opening a promising research direction.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3092703.3092715
ISSTA
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automatic test case generation, Symbolic execution, Search-based software engineering
Programming language,Open problem,Complex data structures,Computer science,Search based testing,Reachability,Heap (data structure),Theoretical computer science,Real-time computing,Symbolic execution,Test case,Search-based software engineering
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.61
39
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
P. Braione11228.08
Giovanni Denaro236929.00
Andrea Mattavelli31418.06
Mauro Pezzè41128.63