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A new approach to program testing

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James C. KingAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software

April 1975

Pages 228 - 233

https://doi.org/10.1145/800027.808444

Published: 01 April 1975 Publication History

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Abstract

The current approach for testing a program is, in principle, quite primitive. Some small sample of the data that a program is expected to handle is presented to the program. If the program produces correct results for the sample, it is assumed to be correct. Much current work focuses on the question of how to choose this sample. We propose that a program can be more effectively tested by executing it "symbolically." Instead of supplying specific constants as input values to a program being tested, one supplies symbols. The normal computational definitions for the basic operations performed by a program can be expanded to accept symbolic inputs and produce symbolic formulae as output. If the flow of control in the program is completely independent of its input parameters, then all output values can be symbolically computed as formulae over the symbolic inputs and examined for correctness. When the control flow of the program is input dependent, a case analysis can be performed producing output formulae for each class of inputs determined by the control flow dependencies. Using these ideas, we have designed and implemented an interactive debugging/testing system called EFFIGY.

References

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Deutsch, L.P. An interactive program verifier, Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. of Calif., Berkeley CA., May 1973.

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Floyd, R.W. Assigning meanings to programs, Proc. Symp. Appl. Math., Amer. Math. Soc., vol. 19, pp. 19-32, 1967.

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Good, D.I. Toward a man-machine system for proving program correctness, Ph.D. dissertation, Comp. Sci. Dept., Univ. of Wisc., Madison, Wisc., June 1970.

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King, J.C. and Floyd, R.W. An interpretation oriented theorem prover over integers, Journal of Comp. and Sys. Sci., vol. 6, no. 4, August 1972, pp. 305-323.

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King, J.C. A program verifier, IFIP Congress 71 Proc., Aug. 1971, pp. 235-249.

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Sites, R.L. Proving that computer programs terminate cleanly, Ph.D. dissertation, Comp. Sci. Dept., Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA., May 1974.

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Topor, R. W. Interactive program verification using virtual programs, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, February 1975.

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Steenvoorden TNaus N(2023)Dynamic TopHat: Start and Stop Tasks at RuntimeProceedings of the 35th Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages10.1145/3652561.3652574(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652561.3652574
Lu SBodík R(2023)Grisette: Symbolic Compilation as a Functional Programming LibraryProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712097:POPL(455-487)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
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Index Terms

A new approach to program testing
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Symbolic and algebraic manipulation
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software

April 1975

567 pages

ISBN:9781450373852

DOI:10.1145/800027

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 10, Issue 6
International Conference on Reliable Software
June 1975
563 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/390016
Editors:
Martin L. Shooman,
Raymond T. Yeh
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1975

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Steenvoorden TNaus N(2023)Dynamic TopHat: Start and Stop Tasks at RuntimeProceedings of the 35th Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages10.1145/3652561.3652574(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652561.3652574
Lu SBodík R(2023)Grisette: Symbolic Compilation as a Functional Programming LibraryProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712097:POPL(455-487)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
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Sahoo RRay M(2022)Metaheuristic Techniques for Test Case GenerationResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch052(1043-1058)Online publication date: 2022
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Sun CFu AGuo XChen T(2022)ReMuSSE: A Redundant Mutant Identification Technique Based on Selective Symbolic ExecutionIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2020.301142371:1(415-428)Online publication date: Mar-2022
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Wang ZZhu SMan KZhu PHao YQian ZKrishnamurthy SLa Porta TDe Lucia MKim YKim JVigna GShi E(2021)Themis: Ambiguity-Aware Network Intrusion Detection based on Symbolic Model ComparisonProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3460120.3484762(3384-3399)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2021
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Jiang BChen YWang DAshraf IChan W(2021)WANA: Symbolic Execution of Wasm Bytecode for Extensible Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00102(926-937)Online publication date: Dec-2021
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