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HVC 2009
Haifa Verification Conference 2009

October 19-22, 2009
Organized by IBM R&D Labs in Israel

image: IBM and Haifa


HVC Award Recepient

DART: Directed Automated Random Testing
Koushik Sen, UC Berkeley

Abstract:
Testing with manually generated test cases is the primary technique used in industry to improve reliability of software--in fact, such testing is reported to account for over half of the typical cost of software development. I will describe directed automated random testing (also known as concolic testing), an efficient approach which combines random and symbolic testing. Concolic testing enables automatic and systematic testing of programs, avoids redundant test cases and does not generate false warnings. Experiments on real-world software show that concolic testing can be used to effectively catch generic errors such as assertion violations, memory leaks, uncaught exceptions, and segmentation faults.
From our initial experience with concolic testing we have learned that a primary challenge in scaling concolic testing to larger programs is the combinatorial explosion of the path space. It is likely that sophisticated strategies for searching this path space are needed to generate inputs that effectively test large programs (by, e.g., achieving significant branch coverage). I will present several such heuristic search strategies, including a novel strategy guided by the control flow graph of the program under test.

Biography:
Koushik Sen is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interest lies in Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and Formal methods. He is interested in developing software tools and methodologies that improve programmer productivity and software quality. He is best known for his work on directed automated random testing and concolic testing. His paper on concolic testing won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ESEC/FSE '05. He received the C.L. and Jane W-S. Liu Award in 2004 for exceptional research promise, the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award in 2005, and the David J. Kuck Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2007 from the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He has received a NSF CAREER Award in 2008. He is a co-winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards in 2009 for the papers titled "Asserting and Checking Determinism for Multithreaded Programs" and "Effective Static Deadlock Detection". He holds a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and M.S. and Ph.D. in CS from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Contact Information

Proceedings Publication

Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science