Plenary keynote address Thursday

During the last decade, research on automating software testing using program analysis has experienced quite a resurgence. A key technical challenge is automatic code-driven test generation: given a program with a set of input parameters, how to automatically generate a set of input values that, upon execution, will exercise as many program statements as possible. Although automating test generation using program analysis is an old idea, practical tools have only started to emerge over the last few years. This recent progress was enabled by advances in dynamic test generation, automated constraint solving, and modern computers´ increasing computational power. All these tools combine techniques from static program analysis (symbolic execution), dynamic analysis (testing and runtime instrumentation), model checking (systematic state-space exploration), and automated constraint solving (SMT solvers). However, they target different application domains and include other original techniques. This talk will present an overview of recent advances on automatic test generation, and discuss applications of these techniques in the software industry.