Abstract
Concolic testing is a software testing technique for generating concrete inputs of programs to increase code coverage and has been developed for years. For programming languages such as C, JAVA, x86 binary code, and JavaScript, there are already plenty of available concolic testers. However, the concolic testers for Python are relatively less. Since Python is a popular programming language, we believe there is a strong need to develop a good one.
Among the existing testers for Python, PyExZ3 is the most well-known and advanced. However, we found some issues of PyExZ3: (1) it implements only a limited number of base types’ (e.g., integer, string) member functions and (2) it automatically downcasts concolic objects and discards related symbolic information as it encounters built-in types’ constructors.
Based on the concept of PyExZ3, we develop a new tool called PyCT to alleviate these two issues. PyCT supports a more complete set of member functions of data types including integer, string, and range. We also propose a new method to upcast constants to concolic ones to prevent unnecessary downcasting. Our evaluation shows that with more member functions being supported, the coverage rate is raised to (80.20%) from (71.55%). It continues to go up to (85.68%) as constant upcasting is also implemented.
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Notes
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We use
project (https://github.com/TheAlgorithms/Python), the 4th top-starred Python project on GitHub, introducing plenty of common algorithm implementations learning purposes. - 2.
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Chen, YF., Tsai, WL., Wu, WC., Yen, DD., Yu, F. (2021). PyCT: A Python Concolic Tester. In: Oh, H. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13008. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_3
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