Heuristic Guided Selective Path Exploration for Loop Structure in Coverage Testing

Static program analysis is a strong technique for analyzing program behavior, but suffers from scalability problem, such as path explosion which is caused by the presence of loops and function calls. This article applies the selective execution mechanism and heuristic strategy on exploring paths through loops. This combinatorial strategy tries to alleviate the path explosion problem from three aspects: 1) exploring loops with different approaches according to their relative position to a specific target; 2) combining static analysis, dynamic execution, and symbolic execution to deal with the separated program; 3) applying a heuristic strategy on offering guidance for the path exploration. These approaches are integrated to automatically generate paths for specified targets in loop structure. Experimental results show that the authors' proposed strategy is available for combination of different loops. It outperforms some existing techniques on achieving better coverage for programs containing loops, and is applicable in engineering.