Abstract. Modern software systems, which often are concurrent and manipulate complex data structures must be extremely reliable. We present a novel framework based on symbolic execution, for automated checking of such systems. We provide a two-fold generalization of traditional symbolic execution based approaches. First, we define a source to source translation to instrument a program, which enables standard model checkers to perform symbolic execution of the program. Second, we give a novel symbolic execution algorithm that handles dynamically allocated structures (e.g., lists and trees), method preconditions (e.g., acyclicity), data (e.g., integers and strings) and concurrency. The program instrumentation enables a model checker to automatically explore different program heap configurations and manipulate logical formulae on program data (using a decision procedure). We illustrate two applications of our framework: checking correctness of multi-threaded programs that take inputs from unbounded domains with complex structure and generation of non-isomorphic test inputs that satisfy a testing criterion. Our implementation for Java uses the Java PathFinder model checker.
In REF its authors devise a framework on top of a model checker (Java PathFinder) to generate test inputs for Java programs.
Generalized Symbolic Execution for Model Checking and Testing
In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems
Computer Science