The DOI matches its Crossref record.
A System to Generate Test Data and Symbolically Execute Programs
Abstract
This paper describes a system that attempts to generate test data for programs written in ANSI Fortran. Given a path, the system symbolically executes the path and creates a set of constraints on the program's input variables. If the set of constraints is linear, linear programming techniques are employed to obtain a solution. A solution to the set of constraints is test data that will drive execution down the given path. If it can be determined that the set of constraints is inconsistent, then the given path is shown to be nonexecutable. To increase the chance of detecting some of the more common programming errors, artificial constraints are temporarily created that simulate error conditions and then an attempt is made to solve each augmented set of constraints. A symbolic representation of the program's output variables in terms of the program's input variables is also created. The symbolic representation is in a human readable form that facilitates error detection as well as being a possible aid in assertion generation and automatic program documentation.
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Citations
Cited by
Search‐based software test data generation: a survey
McMinn, P. (2004) · Software Testing, Verification and Reliability · doi:10.1002/stvr.294 · Cited by 1,368
The oracle problem in software testing: A survey
Barr, E. T., Harman, M., McMinn, P., Shahbaz, M., & Yoo, S. (2015) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2014.2372785 · Cited by 1,104
Constraint-based automatic test data generation
DeMilli, R. A., & Offutt, A. J. (1991) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/32.92910 · Cited by 804
The software model checker Blast: Applications to software engineering
Beyer, D., Henzinger, T. A., Jhala, R., & Majumdar, R. (2007) · International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer · doi:10.1007/s10009-007-0044-z · Cited by 585
Validation, Verification, and Testing of Computer Software
Adrion, W. R., Branstad, M. A., & Cherniavsky, J. C. (1982) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/356876.356879 · Cited by 426
Metadata
- Authors
- Clarke, L. A.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 1976-09
- Volume
- SE-2
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 215-222
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-3520
- 2326-3881
- OpenAlex
- W2109276114
- Cited by
- 764
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 57.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
