research-article

Extending a search-based test generator with adaptive dynamic symbolic execution

Authors:

Juan Pablo Galeotti,

Andrea ArcuriAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA 2014: Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Pages 421 - 424

https://doi.org/10.1145/2610384.2628049

Published: 21 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Automatic unit test generation aims to support developers by alleviating the burden of test writing. Different techniques have been proposed over the years, each with distinct limitations. To overcome these limitations, we present an extension to the EvoSuite unit test generator that combines two of the most popular techniques for test case generation: Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) and Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE). A novel integration of DSE as a step of local improvement in a genetic algorithm results in an adaptive approach, such that the best test generation technique for the problem at hand is favoured, resulting in overall higher code coverage.

References

[1]

A. Arcuri. Theoretical analysis of local search in software testing. In Symposium on Stochastic Algorithms, Foundations and Applications (SAGA), pages 156–168, 2009.

Digital Library

[2]

L. De Moura and N. Bjørner. Z3: An efficient smt solver. In Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, pages 337–340. Springer, 2008.

Digital Library

[3]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. EvoSuite: Automatic test suite generation for object-oriented software. In Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 416–419, 2011.

Digital Library

[4]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. Sound empirical evidence in software testing. In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 178–188, 2012.

Digital Library

[5]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. 1600 faults in 100 projects: Automatically finding faults while achieving high coverage with EvoSuite. Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2013. (to appear).

[6]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. Evosuite at the SBST 2013 tool competition. In International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing (SBST), pages 406–409, 2013.

Digital Library

[7]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. EvoSuite: On the challenges of test case generation in the real world (tool paper). In IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), pages 362–369, 2013.

Digital Library

[8]

G. Fraser and A. Arcuri. Whole test suite generation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(2):276–291, 2013.

Digital Library

[9]

G. Fraser and A. Zeller. Mutation-driven generation of unit tests and oracles. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(2):278–292, 2012.

Digital Library

[10]

J. P. Galeotti, G. Fraser, and A. Arcuri. Improving search-based test suite generation with dynamic symbolic execution. In IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), pages 360–369, 2013.

[11]

C. Ghezzi, M. Jazayeri, and D. Mandrioli. Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 2nd edition, 2002.

Digital Library

[12]

P. Godefroid, N. Klarlund, and K. Sen. Dart: directed automated random testing. In ACM Conference on Programming language design and implementation (PLDI), pages 213–223, 2005.

Digital Library

[13]

M. Harman and P. McMinn. A theoretical and empirical study of search based testing: Local, global and hybrid search. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 36(2):226–247, 2010.

Digital Library

[14]

M. Islam and C. Csallner. Dsc+mock: A test case + mock class generator in support of coding against interfaces. In Int. Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA), pages 26–31, 2010.

Digital Library

[15]

B. Korel. Automated software test data generation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, pages 870–879, 1990.

Digital Library

[16]

P. McMinn. Search-based software test data generation: A survey. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 14(2):105–156, 2004.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ahsan FAnwer F(2023)A Critical Review on Search-Based Security Testing of ProgramsComputational Intelligence10.1007/978-981-19-7346-8_19(207-225)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7346-8_19
Tzoref-Brill RSinha SNassar AGoldin VKermany H(2022)TackleTest: A Tool for Amplifying Test Generation via Type-Based Combinatorial Coverage2022 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00050(444-455)Online publication date: Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00050
Fonseca ASantos PEspada GSilva S(2022)Grammatical Evolution Mapping for Semantically-Constrained Genetic ProgrammingGenetic Programming Theory and Practice XVIII10.1007/978-981-16-8113-4_3(45-62)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8113-4_3
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Extending a search-based test generator with adaptive dynamic symbolic execution
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

Recommendations

Test generation across multiple layers
SBST 2014: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing

Complex software systems frequently come in many layers, each realized in a different programming language. This is a challenge for test generation, as the semantics of each layer have to be determined and integrated. An automatic test generator for ...
Dynamic Analysis of Algebraic Structure to Optimize Test Generation and Test Case Selection
TAIC-PART '09: Proceedings of the 2009 Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference - Practice and Research Techniques

Where no independent specification is available, object-oriented unit testing is limited to exercising all interleaved method paths, seeking unexpected failures.A recent trend in unit testing, that interleaves dynamic analysis between each test cycle, ...
Augmented dynamic symbolic execution
ASE '12: Proceedings of the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) can efficiently explore all simple paths through a program, reliably determining whether there are any program crashes or violations of assertions or code contracts. However, if such automated oracles do not exist, the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA 2014: Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 2014

460 pages

ISBN:9781450326452

DOI:10.1145/2610384

General Chair:
Corina S. Păsăreanu
NASA Ames, USA
,
Program Chair:
Darko Marinov
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

In-Cooperation

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 July 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ISSTA '14

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ISSTA '14: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 21 - 25, 2014

CA, San Jose, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Sponsor:
sigsoft

34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

June 25 - 28, 2025

Trondheim , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

17
Total Citations
View Citations
225
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)6
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 24 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ahsan FAnwer F(2023)A Critical Review on Search-Based Security Testing of ProgramsComputational Intelligence10.1007/978-981-19-7346-8_19(207-225)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7346-8_19
Tzoref-Brill RSinha SNassar AGoldin VKermany H(2022)TackleTest: A Tool for Amplifying Test Generation via Type-Based Combinatorial Coverage2022 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00050(444-455)Online publication date: Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00050
Fonseca ASantos PEspada GSilva S(2022)Grammatical Evolution Mapping for Semantically-Constrained Genetic ProgrammingGenetic Programming Theory and Practice XVIII10.1007/978-981-16-8113-4_3(45-62)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8113-4_3
Arcuri AGaleotti J(2021)Enhancing Search-based Testing with Testability Transformations for Existing APIsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/347727131:1(1-34)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477271
Almasi MHemmati HFraser GMcMinn PBenefelds JTip FBodden E(2018)Search-based detection of deviation failures in the migration of legacy spreadsheet applicationsProceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3213846.3213861(266-275)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3213846.3213861
Li BVendome CLinares-Vásquez MPoshyvanyk DKhomh FRoy CSiegmund J(2018)Aiding comprehension of unit test cases and test suites with stereotype-based taggingProceedings of the 26th Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3196321.3196339(52-63)Online publication date: 28-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196321.3196339
Choudhary AAgrawal AKaur AGaleotti JGorla A(2018)An effective approach for regression test case selection using pareto based multi-objective harmony searchProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing10.1145/3194718.3194722(13-20)Online publication date: 28-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3194718.3194722
Zhu ZJiao LXu X(2018)Combining Search-Based Testing and Dynamic Symbolic Execution by Evolvability Metric2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME.2018.00015(59-68)Online publication date: Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2018.00015
Wang SMao XYu Y(2018)An Initial Step Towards Organ Transplantation Based on GitHub RepositoryIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28726696(59268-59281)Online publication date: 2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2872669
Yang JZhikhartsev ALiu YTan LBodden ESchäfer WDeursen AZisman A(2017)Better test cases for better automated program repairProceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3106237.3106274(831-841)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3106237.3106274
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents