Role of symbolic execution in software testing, debugging and repair

Software testing/debugging is extremely time consuming, and hence techniques to automate debugging or program repair are of value. In this talk, I will discuss the use of symbolic execution for software testing, debugging and repair. If the correctness criteria for the given program is described by a set of test cases, we will show that symbolic execution methods can help uncover a glimpse of the intended program behavior in various set-ups. It is the uncovering of this intended behavior which can help automate the debugging and repair process. Uncovering of the intended behavior, on the other hand, achieved largely by symbolic execution grouping together many “similar” behaviors.

In this talk, I will start with symbolic execution based test generation and explore various notions of “similarity” which go beyond path coverage based testing. We will explore coarser notions of similarity where collections of paths will be placed in the same partition (deemed similar) in an on-the-fly exploration. Subsequently, I will discuss briefly how such coarser-grained notions of similarity can help symbolic execution based debugging methods that we had studied earlier. Finally, I will spend the bulk of the time on program repair – focusing on one specific symbolic reasoning based repair technique called SEMFIX which has been recently proposed by us. This approach is based on repairing a program with a given test-suite. The talk will keep on returning to the theme of what roles symbolic execution can possibly play – explicitly or implicitly – in building such techniques for software testing, debugging and repair.

Speaker Details

Abhik Roychoudhury is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at National University of Singapore, where he has been employed since 2001. Abhik received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000. His research interests are in software testing, program analysis, and trustworthy software, with specific focus on software for real-time embedded systems. Abhik’s research has been recognized by various awards and honors including ACM Distinguished Speaker (2013-16), ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (from SIGSOFT FSE 2009) and IBM Faculty Award (2008). His research has been funded by various agencies including Ministry of Education, A*STAR and Defense Research and Technology Office DRTech. He has served in program committees and organizing committees of at least fifty conferences in software engineering and embedded systems