Generating Test Suites With Augmented Dynamic Symbolic Execution

Unit test generation tools typically aim at one of two objectives: to explore the program behaviour in order to exercise automated oracles, or to produce a representative test set that can be used to manually add oracles or to use as a regression test set. Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) can efficiently explore all simple paths through a program, exercising automated oracles such as assertions or code contracts. However, its original intention was not to produce representative test sets. Although DSE tools like Pex can retain subsets of the tests seen during the exploration, customer feedback revealed that users expect different values than those produced by Pex, and sometimes also more than one value for a given condition or program path.