HVC 2009
Haifa Verification Conference 2009
October 19-22, 2009
Organized by IBM R&D Labs in Israel
| 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.
Proceedings Publication
Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science
