Interprocedural Path Complexity Analysis
Authors: 
Mira Kaniyur, Ana Cavalcante-Studart, Yihan Yang, Sangeon Park, David Chen, Duy Lam, Lucas BangAuthors Info & Claims
Mira Kaniyur, Ana Cavalcante-Studart, Yihan Yang, Sangeon Park, David Chen, Duy Lam, Lucas BangAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 162 - 173
Abstract
Software testing techniques like symbolic execution face significant challenges with path explosion. Asymptotic Path Complexity (APC) quantifies this path explosion complexity, but existing APC methods do not work for interprocedural functions in general. Our new algorithm, APC-IP, efficiently computes APC for a wider range of functions, including interprocedural ones, improving over previous methods in both speed and scope. We implement APC-IP atop the existing software Metrinome, and test it against a benchmark of C functions, comparing it to existing and baseline approaches as well as comparing it to the path explosion of the symbolic execution engine Klee. The results show that APC-IP not only aligns with previous APC values but also excels in performance, scalability, and handling complex source code. It also provides a complexity prediction of the number of paths explored by Klee, extending the APC metric's applicability and surpassing previous implementations.
References
[1]
Saswat Anand, Patrice Godefroid, and Nikolai Tillmann. 2008. Demand-Driven Compositional Symbolic Execution. In Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, C. R. Ramakrishnan and Jakob Rehof (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg. 367–381. isbn:978-3-540-78800-3
[2]
Lucas Bang, Abdulbaki Aydin, and Tevfik Bultan. 2015. Automatically computing path complexity of programs. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2015, Bergamo, Italy, August 30 - September 4, 2015, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Mark Harman, and Patrick Heymans (Eds.). ACM, 61–72. https://doi.org/10.1145/2786805.2786863
[3]
Gabriel Bessler, Josh Cordova, Shaheen Cullen-Baratloo, Sofiane Dissem, Emily Lu, Sofia Devin, Ibrahim Abughararh, and Lucas Bang. 2021. Metrinome: Path Complexity Predicts Symbolic Execution Path Explosion. In 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings, ICSE Companion 2021, Madrid, Spain, May 25-28, 2021. IEEE.
[4]
Dirk Beyer and Ashgan Fararooy. 2010. A Simple and Effective Measure for Complex Low-Level Dependencies. 2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension, 80–83.
[5]
Peter Boonstoppel, Cristian Cadar, and Dawson Engler. 2008. RWset: Attacking Path Explosion in Constraint-Based Test Generation. In Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, C. R. Ramakrishnan and Jakob Rehof (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg. 351–366. isbn:978-3-540-78800-3
[6]
Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dunbar, and Dawson Engler. 2008. KLEE: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI’08). USENIX Association, USA. 209–224.
[7]
G. Ann Campbell. 2018. Cognitive Complexity: An Overview and Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 57–58. isbn:9781450357135 https://doi.org/10.1145/3194164.3194186
[8]
N. Chomsky and M.P. Schützenberger. 1959. The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages. In Computer Programming and Formal Systems, P. Braffort and D. Hirschberg (Eds.) (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Vol. 26). Elsevier, 118–161.
[9]
Nasir Eisty, George Thiruvathukal, and Jeffrey Carver. 2018. A Survey of Software Metric Use in Research Software Development. 212–222. https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience.2018.00036
[10]
P. Flajolet and R. Sedgewick. 2009. Analytic Combinatorics. Cambridge University Press. isbn:9781139477161
[11]
Robert L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik. 1994. Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, USA. isbn:0201558025
[12]
Hermann Gruber, Jonathan Lee, and Jeffrey O. Shallit. 2012. Enumerating regular expressions and their languages. CoRR, abs/1204.4982 (2012).
[13]
Maurice H. Halstead. 1977. Elements of Software Science (Operating and Programming Systems Series). Elsevier Science Inc., USA. isbn:0444002057
[14]
Saparya Krishnamoorthy, Michael S. Hsiao, and Loganathan Lingappan. 2010. Tackling the Path Explosion Problem in Symbolic Execution-Driven Test Generation for Programs. In 2010 19th IEEE Asian Test Symposium. 59–64. https://doi.org/10.1109/ATS.2010.19
[15]
H. Levy and F. Lessman. 1992. Finite Difference Equations. Dover Publications. isbn:9780486672601 lccn:lc92020438
[16]
Thomas J. McCabe. 1976. A Complexity Measure. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 2, 4 (1976), 308–320.
[17]
Brian A. Nejmeh. 1988. NPATH: A Measure of Execution Path Complexity and Its Applications. Commun. ACM, 31, 2 (1988), Feb., 188–200. issn:0001-0782
[18]
Alberto S. Nuñez-Varela, Héctor G. Pérez-Gonzalez, Francisco E. Martínez-Perez, and Carlos Soubervielle-Montalvo. 2017. Source code metrics: A systematic mapping study. Journal of Systems and Software, 128 (2017), 164–197. issn:0164-1212 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2017.03.044
[19]
Eli Pregerson, Shaheen Cullen-Baratloo, David Chen, Duy Lam, Max Szostak, and Lucas Bang. 2023. Formalizing Path Explosion for Recursive Functions via Asymptotic Path Complexity. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Formal Methods in Software Engineering (FormaliSE), Melbourne, Australia, May 14-15, 2023. IEEE.
[20]
R.S. Pressman and B.R. Maxim. 2019. Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach. McGraw-Hill Education. isbn:9781259872976 lccn:2019017652
[21]
R. Sedgewick and P. Flajolet. 2013. An Introduction to the Analysis of Algorithms: Introdu Analysi Algori_p2. Pearson Education. isbn:9780133373486
[22]
Michael Sipser. 2013. Introduction to the Theory of Computation (third ed.). Course Technology, Boston, MA. isbn:113318779X
[23]
Harry M. Sneed. 1995. Understanding Software through Numbers: A Metric Based Approach to Program Comprehension. Journal of Software Maintenance, 7, 6 (1995), nov, 405–419. issn:1040-550X https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.4360070604
[24]
Richard P. Stanley. 2011. Enumerative Combinatorics: Volume 1 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press, USA. isbn:1107602629
[25]
Dinuka R. Wijendra and K. P. Hewagamage. 2022. Cognitive Complexity Reduction through Control Flow Graph Generation. In 2022 IEEE 7th International conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT). 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1109/I2CT54291.2022.9824923
[26]
Herbert S. Wilf. 2006. Generatingfunctionology. A. K. Peters, Ltd., USA. isbn:1568812795
Index Terms
- Interprocedural Path Complexity Analysis
Recommendations
Path Complexity Analysis for Interprocedural Code
ICSE-Companion '24: Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion ProceedingsSymbolic execution's path explosion is a critical issue in software testing, quantified by Asymptotic Path Complexity (APC) [3]. APC, more precise than cyclomatic [6] or NPATH [7] complexities, measures the effort to cover paths in code analysis [1]. It'...
Interprocedural pointer alias analysis
We present practical approximation methods for computing and representing interprocedural aliases for a program written in a language that includes pointers, reference parameters, and recursion. We present the following contributions: (1) a framework ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
September 2024
1928 pages
Copyright © 2024 Owner/Author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 11 September 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
- NSF (National Science Foundation)
Conference
ISSTA '24
Sponsor:
ISSTA '24: 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
September 16 - 20, 2024
Vienna, Austria
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%
Upcoming Conference
ISSTA '25
- Sponsor:
- sigsoft
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 185Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)185
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)33
Reflects downloads up to 28 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in