Efficient Leveraging of Symbolic Execution to Advanced Coverage Criteria

Abstract

Automatic test data generation (ATG) is a major topic in software engineering. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the coverage criteria supported by state-of-the-art white-box ATG technologies, especially Dynamic Symbolic Execution, and advanced coverage criteria found in the literature. We define a new testing criterion, label coverage, and prove it to be both expressive and amenable to efficient automation. We propose several innovative techniques resulting in an effective blackbox support for label coverage, while a direct approach induces an exponential blow-up of the search space. Experiments show that our optimisations yield very significant savings allowing to leverage ATG to label coverage with only a slight overhead.