@inproceedings{3c2ae2d23afd4f668ca4bfc38420a931,
title = "Targeted test input generation using symbolic-concrete backward execution",
abstract = "Knowing inputs that cover a specific branch or statement in a program is useful for debugging and regression testing. Symbolic backward execution (SBE) is a natural approach to find such targeted inputs. However, SBE struggles with complicated arithmetic, external method calls, and datadependent loops that occur in many real-world programs. We propose symcretic execution, a novel combination of SBE and concrete forward execution that can efficiently find targeted inputs despite these challenges. An evaluation of our approach on a range of test cases shows that symcretic execution finds inputs in more cases than concolic testing tools while exploring fewer path segments. Integration of our approach will allow test generation tools to fill coverage gaps and static bug detectors to verify candidate bugs with concrete test cases.",
keywords = "Backward execution, Concolic, Goal-directed, Symcretic",
author = "Peter Dinges and Gul Agha",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2014 ACM.; 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2014 ; Conference date: 15-09-2014 Through 19-09-2014",
year = "2014",
doi = "10.1145/2642937.2642951",
language = "English (US)",
series = "ASE 2014 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "31--36",
booktitle = "ASE 2014 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering",
address = "United States",
}