Hansol Choe  Shin Hong

10.5626/JOK.2021.48.2.201

Test Generation Symbolic Execution Concolic Testing bounded search strategy

This paper proposes a loop-bounded search strategy for effective and efficient coverage achievement in concolic testing. In selecting a new path to explore, a loop-bounded search strategy limits the number of iterations in a loop to a certain loop-bound, so that the concolic testing is guided to explore various program behaviors within a limited range. In addition, to extend the range of path exploration gradually, this search strategy increments the loop-bound over test executions based on their coverage achievement rates. We implemented three versions of loop-bounded search strategies based on three existing concolic search strategies of CREST. The experiments with 4 real-world target programs (Vim, Grep, Busybox Awk, and Busybox Sed) showed that CREST achieves a higher branch coverage more quickly when the loop-bounded search strategies are applied.