Survey on Dynamic Symbolic Execution for Automatic Test Generation

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Survey on Dynamic Symbolic Execution for Automatic Test Generation"

by

Mr. Hyunmin SEO


Abstract:

Software testing is an inevitable step in software development process. 
However, manual testing is labor intensive and expensive. Thus, there has 
been much effort to automate the testing process. Specifically, automatic 
test generation has been one of the most active research area in the 
software engineering and various techniques have been proposed over the 
last decades. Recently, dynamic symbolic execution (DSE)-based test 
generation has received much research interest with the advances in the 
computing power and constraint solving techniques.

In this paper, we provide a survey on DSE-based testing. First, we 
introduce and compare four representative automatic test generation 
techniques, random testing, combinatorial testing, search-based testing 
and symbolic execution-based testing. Second, we present DSE, a variation 
of symbolic execution which has been proposed to overcome several 
limitations of pure symbolic execution. We then discuss the challenges in 
DSE with the existing solutions for the challenges. Finally, we introduce 
various search strategies in DSE. Search strategies are proposed to deal 
with the path explosion problem specifically. A strategy decides which 
path to choose at each test generation and explores interesting execution 
paths only with the goal of achieving high coverage fast. However, finding 
good criteria to guide the search is still remaining work. From this 
survey, we can learn different automatic test generation techniques with 
their strength and weakness. The discussed challenges in DSE can shed 
light to our future work.


Date:			Monday, 6 January 2014

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3501
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Charles Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Dr. Lei Chen


**** ALL are Welcome ****