Evaluating Symbolic Execution-Based Test Tools

Abstract

In recent years several symbolic execution-based tools have been developed to automatically select relevant test inputs from the source code of the system under test. However, each of these tools has different advantages, and there is no detailed feedback available on the actual capabilities of the various tools. In order to evaluate test input generators we collected a representative set of programming language concepts that should be handled by the tools, mapped them to 300 code snippets that would serve as inputs for the tools, created an automated framework to execute and evaluate these snippets, and performed experiments on four Java and one .NET test generator tools. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, and identify hard code parts that are difficult to tackle for most of the tools. We hope that our research could serve as actionable feedback to tool developers and help practitioners assess the readiness of test input generation.