Cooperative verifier-based testing with CoVeriTest

Abstract

AbstractTesting is a widely applied technique to evaluate software quality, and coverage criteria are often used to assess the adequacy of a generated test suite. However, manually constructing an adequate test suite is typically too expensive, and numerous techniques for automatic test-suite generation were proposed. All of them come with different strengths. To build stronger test-generation tools, different techniques should be combined. In this paper, we study cooperative combinations of verification approaches for test generation, which exchange high-level information. We present CoVeriTest, a hybrid technique for test-suite generation. CoVeriTest iteratively applies different conditional model checkers and allows users to adjust the level of cooperation and to configure individual time limits for each conditional model checker. In our experiments, we systematically study different CoVeriTest cooperation setups, which either use combinations of explicit-state model checking and predicate abstraction, or bounded model checking and symbolic execution. A comparison with state-of-the-art test-generation tools reveals that CoVeriTest achieves higher coverage for many programs (about 15%).