Quantifying the Characteristics of Java Programs That May Influence Symbolic Execution from a Test Data Generation Perspective

2014 IEEE 38th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference Pub Date : 2014-07-21 DOI:10.1109/COMPSAC.2014.26

M. Eler, A. T. Endo, Vinicius H. S. Durelli

{"title":"Quantifying the Characteristics of Java Programs That May Influence Symbolic Execution from a Test Data Generation Perspective","authors":"M. Eler, A. T. Endo, Vinicius H. S. Durelli","doi":"10.1109/COMPSAC.2014.26","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Testing plays a key role in assessing the quality of a software product. During testing, a program is run in hopes of finding faults. As exhaustive testing is seldom possible, specific testing criteria have been proposed to help testers to devise test cases that cover the most relevant faulty scenarios. Manually creating test cases that satisfy these criteria is time consuming, error prone, and unwieldy. Symbolic execution has been used as an effective way of automatically generating test data that meets those criteria. Although this technique has been used for over three decades, several challenges remain, such as path explosion, precision of floating-point data, constraints with complex expressions, and dependency of external libraries. In this paper, we explore a sample of 100 open source Java projects in order to analyze characteristics that are relevant to generate test data using symbolic execution. The results provide valuable insight into how researchers and practitioners can tailor symbolic execution techniques and tools to better suit the needs of different Java applications.","PeriodicalId":106871,"journal":{"name":"2014 IEEE 38th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2014-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"9","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2014 IEEE 38th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2014.26","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 9

Abstract

Testing plays a key role in assessing the quality of a software product. During testing, a program is run in hopes of finding faults. As exhaustive testing is seldom possible, specific testing criteria have been proposed to help testers to devise test cases that cover the most relevant faulty scenarios. Manually creating test cases that satisfy these criteria is time consuming, error prone, and unwieldy. Symbolic execution has been used as an effective way of automatically generating test data that meets those criteria. Although this technique has been used for over three decades, several challenges remain, such as path explosion, precision of floating-point data, constraints with complex expressions, and dependency of external libraries. In this paper, we explore a sample of 100 open source Java projects in order to analyze characteristics that are relevant to generate test data using symbolic execution. The results provide valuable insight into how researchers and practitioners can tailor symbolic execution techniques and tools to better suit the needs of different Java applications.

查看原文本刊更多论文

从测试数据生成的角度量化可能影响符号执行的Java程序的特征

测试在评估软件产品的质量方面起着关键的作用。在测试期间，运行程序是希望找到错误。由于详尽的测试很少是可能的，因此提出了特定的测试标准来帮助测试人员设计涵盖最相关的错误场景的测试用例。手动创建满足这些标准的测试用例是耗时的，容易出错的，而且很笨拙。符号执行已被用作自动生成满足这些标准的测试数据的有效方法。尽管这种技术已经使用了30多年，但仍然存在一些挑战，例如路径爆炸、浮点数据的精度、复杂表达式的约束以及对外部库的依赖。在本文中，我们研究了100个开源Java项目的样本，以便分析与使用符号执行生成测试数据相关的特征。研究结果为研究人员和实践者如何定制符号执行技术和工具以更好地适应不同Java应用程序的需求提供了有价值的见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

2014 IEEE 38th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

自引率

0.00%

发文量