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Test Case Generation by Symbolic Execution: Basic Concepts, a CLP-Based Instance, and Actor-Based Concurrency

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Formal Methods for Executable Software Models (SFM 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8483))

Abstract

The focus of this tutorial is white-box test case generation (TCG) based on symbolic execution. Symbolic execution consists in executing a program with the contents of its input arguments being symbolic variables rather than concrete values. A symbolic execution tree characterizes the set of execution paths explored during the symbolic execution of a program. Test cases can be then obtained from the successful branches of the tree. The tutorial is split into three parts: (1) The first part overviews the basic techniques used in TCG to ensure termination, handling heap-manipulating programs, achieving compositionality in the process and guiding TCG towards interesting test cases. (2) In the second part, we focus on a particular implementation of the TCG framework in constraint logic programming (CLP). In essense, the imperative object-oriented program under test is automatically transformed into an equivalent executable CLP-translated program. The main advantage of CLP-based TCG is that the standard mechanism of CLP performs symbolic execution for free. The PET system is an open-source software that implements this approach. (3) Finally, in the last part, we study the extension of TCG to actor-based concurrent programs.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DSIC, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain

    Elvira Albert, Puri Arenas & Miguel Gómez-Zamalloa

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK

    Jose Miguel Rojas

Authors
  1. Elvira Albert
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  2. Puri Arenas
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  3. Miguel Gómez-Zamalloa
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  4. Jose Miguel Rojas
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze di Base e Fondamenti, Università di Urbino, Piazza della Republica 13, 61029, Urbino, Italy

    Marco Bernardo

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, 10149, Torino, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

  3. Fachbereich Informatik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hochschulstraße 10, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Reiner Hähnle

  4. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1080 Blindern, 0316, Oslo, Norway

    Einar Broch Johnsen

  5. Institut für Softwaretechnik und Fahrzeuginformatik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Mühlenpfordtstraße 23, 38106, Braunschweig, Germany

    Ina Schaefer

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Albert, E., Arenas, P., Gómez-Zamalloa, M., Rojas, J.M. (2014). Test Case Generation by Symbolic Execution: Basic Concepts, a CLP-Based Instance, and Actor-Based Concurrency. In: Bernardo, M., Damiani, F., Hähnle, R., Johnsen, E.B., Schaefer, I. (eds) Formal Methods for Executable Software Models. SFM 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07317-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07317-0_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07317-0

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