Fast Loop Boundary Coverage Testing in Symbolic Execution

Abstract

Symbolic execution is a promising approach for software analyzing and testing, but it still suffers from scalability issues, in which a significant challenge is how to handle loop caused path explosion. This paper proposes a new approach to mitigate the scalability problem brought by loops in symbolic execution. By reusing the previously calculated results captured from satisfiability verification process, we implement a fast loop boundary coverage test strategy which can eliminate a large number of redundant paths and unnecessary solver invocations. Experimental results on Symbolic (Java) PathFinder show that our strategy can greatly improve the efficiency of testing for programs having loops.