How is our research work related to software industry?
Automated Software Engineering Research Group 
Projects:
     Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Program Source Code funded by ARO, NSF CSR, ARO STIR
      Software Testing and Analysis for Software Evolution funded by NSF SoD
      Testing and Verification of Security Policies funded by NSF CyberTrust
      Improving Automation in Developer Testing funded by Microsoft Research, NSF SoD, ARO
      Mining Bug Reports and Test Execution funded by IBM Jazz Award
      Deep Root-Cause Performance Analysis funded by IBM Faculty Award
      Wiki site for Teaching Parameterized Unit Testing/Pex
      The Yangtse Project on Automated Software Testing in the Absence of Specifications
      The Mose Project on Mining Open Source Software Engineering Data

Test Generation

• DSD-Crasher: A Hybrid Analysis Tool for Bug Finding (TOSEM 2008, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2008)
• DiffGen: Automated Regression Unit-Test Generation (ASE 2008, Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2008)
• Evacon: A Framework for Integrating Evolutionary and Concolic Testing for Object-Oriented Programs (ASE 2007, Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Short Paper, 2007)
• UnitPlus: Assisting Developer Testing in Eclipse (ETX 2007, Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology eXchange Workshop at OOPSLA 2007, 2007)
• An Empirical Comparison of Automated Generation and Classification Techniques for Object-Oriented Unit Testing (ASE 2006, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006)
• Tool-Assisted Unit-Test Generation and Selection Based on Operational Abstractions (ASE Journal 2006, Automated Software Engineering Journal, A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2003 conference, 2006)    
• APTE: Automated Pointcut Testing for AspectJ Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• This paper proposes APTE, an automated framework that tests pointcuts in AspectJ programs with the help of AJTE, an existing unit-testing framework without weaving. Our new APTE framework identifies joinpoints that satisfy a pointcut expression and a set of boundary joinpoints.
• Substra: A Framework for Automatic Generation of Integration Tests (AST 2006, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2006)
• A Framework and Tool Supports for Generating Test Inputs of AspectJ Programs (AOSD 2006, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, 2006)
• Symstra: A Framework for Generating Object-Oriented Unit Tests using Symbolic Execution (TACAS 2005, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, 2005)
• Rostra: A Framework for Detecting Redundant Object-Oriented Unit Tests (ASE 2004, Proceedings of of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2004)
• Mutually Enhancing Test Generation and Specification Inference (FATES 03, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing of Software, 2003)

Test Selection

• Applying Interface-Contract Mutation in Regression Testing of Component-Based Software (ICSM 2007, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2007) 
• An Empirical Comparison of Automated Generation and Classification Techniques for Object-Oriented Unit Testing (ASE 2006, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006)
• Tool-Assisted Unit-Test Generation and Selection Based on Operational Abstractions (ASE Journal 2006, Automated Software Engineering Journal, A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2003 conference, 2006)
• APTE: Automated Pointcut Testing for AspectJ Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• Towards Regression Test Selection for Aspect-Oriented Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• Automatically Identifying Special and Common Unit Tests for Object-Oriented Programs (ISSRE 2005, Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, 2005)    
• Rostra: A Framework for Detecting Redundant Object-Oriented Unit Tests (ASE 2004, Proceedings of of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2004)

Test Abstraction

• DSD-Crasher: A Hybrid Analysis Tool for Bug Finding (TOSEM 2008, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2008)
• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines from Unit-Test Executions (ICSE 2006 DE, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, Research Demonstration, 2006) 
• Substra: A Framework for Automatic Generation of Integration Tests (AST 2006, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2006)
• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines Based on Branch Coverage (RETR 2005, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Reverse Engineering To Requirements, 2005)
• Automatic Extraction of Sliced Object State Machines for Component Interfaces (SAVCBS 2004, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems, 2004)
• Automatic Extraction of Object-Oriented Observer Abstractions from Unit-Test Executions (ICFEM 2004, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, 2004)

Test Oracle Augmentation

• UnitPlus: Assisting Developer Testing in Eclipse (ETX 2007, Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology eXchange Workshop at OOPSLA 2007, 2007)
• Towards a Framework for Differential Unit Testing of Object-Oriented Programs (AST 2007, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2007)
• An Empirical Comparison of Automated Generation and Classification Techniques for Object-Oriented Unit Testing (ASE 2006, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006)
• Tool-Assisted Unit-Test Generation and Selection Based on Operational Abstractions (ASE Journal 2006, Automated Software Engineering Journal, A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2003 conference, 2006) 
• Augmenting Automatically Generated Unit-Test Suites with Regression Oracle Checking (ECOOP 2006, Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2006) 
• Checking Inside the Black Box: Regression Testing By Comparing Value Spectra (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, A special issue of selected papers from the ICSM 2004 conference, 2005)

Regression Testing

• DiffGen: Automated Regression Unit-Test Generation (ASE 2008, Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2008)
• Applying Interface-Contract Mutation in Regression Testing of Component-Based Software (ICSM 2007, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2007) 
• Towards a Framework for Differential Unit Testing of Object-Oriented Programs (AST 2007, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2007)
• Towards Regression Test Selection for Aspect-Oriented Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• Augmenting Automatically Generated Unit-Test Suites with Regression Oracle Checking (ECOOP 2006, Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2006)    
• Checking Inside the Black Box: Regression Testing By Comparing Value Spectra (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, A special issue of selected papers from the ICSM 2004 conference, 2005)

Mining Program Executions

• DSD-Crasher: A Hybrid Analysis Tool for Bug Finding (TOSEM 2008, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2008)
• Mining for Software Reliability (ICDM 2007, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, 2007)
• Mining Software Engineering Data (ICSE 2007, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2007)
• An Empirical Comparison of Automated Generation and Classification Techniques for Object-Oriented Unit Testing (ASE 2006, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006)
• Tool-Assisted Unit-Test Generation and Selection Based on Operational Abstractions (ASE Journal 2006, Automated Software Engineering Journal, A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2003 conference, 2006)    
• Data Mining for Software Engineering (KDD 2006, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2006)
• Inferring Access-Control Policy Properties via Machine Learning (POLICY 2006, Proceedings of 7th IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2006)
• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines from Unit-Test Executions (ICSE 2006 DE, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, Research Demonstration, 2006) 
• Substra: A Framework for Automatic Generation of Integration Tests (AST 2006, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2006)
• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines Based on Branch Coverage (RETR 2005, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Reverse Engineering To Requirements, 2005)
• Automatically Identifying Special and Common Unit Tests for Object-Oriented Programs (ISSRE 2005, Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, 2005)
• Helping Users Avoid Bugs in GUI Applications (ICSE 2005, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005)
• Automatic Extraction of Sliced Object State Machines for Component Interfaces (SAVCBS 2004, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems, 2004)
• Automatic Extraction of Object-Oriented Observer Abstractions from Unit-Test Executions (ICFEM 2004, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, 2004)
• Mutually Enhancing Test Generation and Specification Inference (FATES 03, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing of Software, 2003)
• Software Component Protocol Inference (UW CSE General Exam Report, 2003)

Mining Software Repositories

• An Approach to Detecting Duplicate Bug Reports using Natural Language and Execution Information (ICSE 2008, Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2008)
• SpotWeb: Detecting Framework Hotspots via Mining Open Source Repositories on the Web (MSR 2008, Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2008)
• Static Detection of API Error-Handling Bugs via Mining Source Code (NCSU CSC 2007, NCSU CSC Technical Report, 2007)
• NEGWeb: Static Defect Detection via Searching Billions of Lines of Open Source Code (NCSU CSC 2007, NCSU CSC Technical Report, 2007)
• PARSEWeb: A Programmer Assistant for Reusing Open Source Code on the Web (ASE 2007, Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2007)
• Automated Detection of API Refactorings in Libraries (ASE 2007, Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Short Paper, 2007)
• Mining for Software Reliability (ICDM 2007, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, 2007)
• Mining API Patterns as Partial Orders from Source Code: From Usage Scenarios to Specifications (ESEC/FSE 2007, Proceedings of European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2007)
• Mining Software Engineering Data (ICSE 2007, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2007)
• Automated Inference of Poincuts in Aspect-Oriented Refactoring (ICSE 2007, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2007)
• Mining Interface Specifications for Generating Checkable Robustness Properties (ISSRE 2006, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering, 2006)
• Data Mining for Software Engineering (KDD 2006, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2006)
• Understanding Software Application Interfaces via String Analysis (ICSE 2006 ER, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, Emerging Results Track, 2006)
• MAPO: Mining API Usages from Open Source Repositories (MSR 2006, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, 2006)

Testing and Analysis of Security Policies

• XEngine: A Fast and Scalable XACML Policy Evaluation Engine (SIGMETRICS 2008, Proceedings of the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems , 2008)
• Assessing Quality of Policy Properties in Verification of Access Control Policies (NCSU CSC 2007, NCSU CSC Technical Report, 2007)
• Conformance Checking of Access Control Policies Specified in XACML (IWSSE 2007, Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Security in Software Engineering, 2007)
• Automated Test Generation for Access Control Policies via Change-Impact Analysis (SESS 2007, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems, 2007)
• A Fault Model and Mutation Testing of Access Control Policies (WWW 2007, Proceedings of International Conference on World Wide Web, 2007)
Defining and Measuring Policy Coverage in Testing Access Control Policies (ICICS 2006, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information and Communications Security, 2006)
• Automated Test Generation for Access Control Policies (ISSRE 2006 Fast Abstract, Supplemental Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering, 2006)
Inferring Access-Control Policy Properties via Machine Learning (POLICY 2006, Proceedings of 7th IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2006)

Application Security Testing

• SQLUnitGen: SQL Injection Testing Using Static and Dynamic Analysis (ISSRE 2006 Student Program, Supplemental Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering, 2006)

Testing and Analysis of Aspect-Oriented Programs

• Automated Inference of Pointcuts in Aspect-Oriented Refactoring (ICSE 2007, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2007)
• Perspectives on Automated Testing of Aspect-Oriented Programs (WTAOP 2007, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2007)
• Detecting Redundant Unit Tests for AspectJ Programs (ISSRE 2006, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering, 2006)
• Efficient Mutant Generation for Mutation Testing of Pointcuts in Aspect-Oriented Programs (MUTATION 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Mutation Analysis, 2006)
• APTE: Automated Pointcut Testing for AspectJ Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• Towards Regression Test Selection for Aspect-Oriented Programs (WTAOP 2006, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs, 2006)
• A Framework and Tool Supports for Generating Test Inputs of AspectJ Programs (AOSD 2006, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, 2006)

Testing and Analysis of Web Services and Applications

• Automated Testing and Response Analysis of Web Services (ICWS 2007 Industry, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services, Research Demonstration, 2007)
• WebSob: A Tool for Robustness Testing of Web Services (ICSE 2007 DE, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, Research Demonstration, 2007)

Testing and Analysis of Software Designs

• A Framework and Tool Supports for Testing Modularity of Software Design (ASE 2007, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Short Paper, 2007)

Software Verification

• Static Detection of API Error-Handling Bugs via Mining Source Code (NCSU CSC 2007, NCSU CSC Technical Report, 2007)
• NEGWeb: Static Defect Detection via Searching Billions of Lines of Open Source Code (NCSU CSC 2007, NCSU CSC Technical Report, 2007)
• Mining for Software Reliability (ICDM 2007, Tutorial, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, 2007)
• Mining API Patterns as Partial Orders from Source Code: From Usage Scenarios to Specifications (ESEC/FSE 2007, Proceedings of European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2007)
• Mining Interface Specifications for Generating Checkable Robustness Properties (ISSRE 2006, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering, 2006)
• Effective Generation of Interface Robustness Properties for Static Analysis (ASE 2006, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2006)

Dynamic Analysis for Program Comprehension

• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines from Unit-Test Executions (ICSE 2006 DE, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, Research Demonstration, 2006) 
• Substra: A Framework for Automatic Generation of Integration Tests (AST 2006, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Automation of Software Test, 2006)
• Automatic Extraction of Abstract-Object-State Machines Based on Branch Coverage (RETR 2005, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Reverse Engineering To Requirements, 2005)
• Automatic Extraction of Sliced Object State Machines for Component Interfaces (SAVCBS 2004, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems, 2004)
• Automatic Extraction of Object-Oriented Observer Abstractions from Unit-Test Executions (ICFEM 2004, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, 2004)

Static Analysis for Program Comprehension

• Automated Detection of API Refactorings in Libraries (ASE 2007, Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Short Paper, 2007)
• Understanding Software Application Interfaces via String Analysis (ICSE 2006 ER, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, Emerging Results Track, 2006)
• MAPO: Mining API Usages from Open Source Repositories (MSR 2006, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, 2006)
• A Model-based Approach to Object-Oriented Software Metrics (Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2002)
• JBOORET: an Automated Tool to Recover OO Design and Source Models (COMPSAC 2001, Proceedings of the 25th Anniversary Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference, 2001)
• JBOOMT: Jade Bird Object-Oriented Metrics Tool (Chinese Journal of Electronics, 2000)
• C++ Program Information Database for Analysis Tools (TOOLS 1998, Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, 1998) 

  How is our research work related to software industry?

• The commercial Parasoft Jtest Java testing tool won numerous awards and has been adopted by thousands of development teams worldwide. Its clients include IBM, HP, and over 10,000 companies worldwide. On 26 March 2002, Parasoft Co. announced the commercial Jtest 4.5 Java testing tool, which has been popularly used in industry.  Jtest 4.5 allows the user to specify method-call lengths of generated tests from one up to three. When setting method-call lengths as three, the test generation time is long and the number of generated tests is large for relatively large programs. On January 2004, we proposed a novel definition of redundant tests based on method inputs (different from traditional definitions of redundant tests based on structural coverage) and published our preliminary results (in a technical report) on detecting a high percentage (about 90%) of redundant tests among tests generated by Jtest 4.5 and later published the more comprehensive results in our ASE 04 paper; these identified redundant tests increase the testing time without increasing the ability to detect faults or increase confidence. Parasoft announced Jtest 5.0 on 3 February 2004 and Jtest 5.1 on 28 June 2004; neither of these new versions allows the user to configure the method-call lengths for generating a large number of test inputs any more. We expect that the new techniques in our ASE 04 paper can be ultimately incorporated by the existing test generation tools to improve testing performance greatly, benefiting software practitioners.
  
  Updates: Mar 17, 2005:  Parasoft Jtest 5.1 won Software Development Magazine's 15th Annual Productivity Award.
                  Nov 5, 2004:   Upon Parasoft's invitation, Tao Xie visited Parasoft and gave a presentation on "Strategic Automated Software Testing in the Absence of Specifications".
                  Sept 16, 2004: We were notified by Parasoft Co. that Parasoft Jtest 6.0 (internal version, not released yet) has fixed the test redundancy issue identified by us and added back the option to generate long method-call sequences.]
  
  Tao Xie, Darko Marinov, and David Notkin. Rostra: A Framework for Detecting Redundant Object-Oriented Unit Tests. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2004), Linz, Austria, pp. 196-205, September 2004. [PDF][BibTex] ©2004 IEEE

• Within our knowledge, our ASE 03 paper is the first proposed approach of using inferred program semantic properties (other than structural coverage) for helping test generation and test selection for inspection. Automated test generation tools are able to produce and execute a large number of test inputs that extensively exercise the unit under test. However, without a priori specifications, developers need to manually verify the outputs of these test executions, which is generally impractical. To reduce this cost, we developed unit test selection techniques to select a valuable subset of automatically generated test inputs. Then developers can verify their outputs, equip them with test oracles, and put them into the existing test suite. In particular, we feed dynamically inferred program behaviors in the form of specifications (e.g., the ones inferred by Daikon) to a specification-based test generation tool (e.g., Parasoft Jtest) so that some benefits of specification-based testing can be achieved without requiring specifications. On 2 March 2004, Agitar Software Inc. announced the commercial Agitator testing tool for Java. The tool automatically generates initial tests, infers Daikon-invariant-like observations, lets developers confirm these observations to assertions, and generates more tests to violate these inferred&confirmed observations.
  
  Updates: July 17, 2006:   Agitar people published an ISSTA 06 paper on Agitator.
                  Feb 7, 2006:     Agitar CTO Alberto Savoia gave a guest lecture at Tao Xie's CSC 591T course at North Carolina State University.  
                  April 7, 2005:   Agitar CTO Alberto Savoia gave a guest lecture at UC Berkeley on Unit/Developer Testing, describing Agitator's philosophy.
                  Mar 17, 2005:   Agitar’s Agitator and Dashboard 2.0 won Software Development Magazine's 15th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Award. 
                  Nov 17, 2004:   Kent Beck gave a presentation on "Developer Testing" at Developer Testing Forum. Listen to it! 
                  Aug 19, 2004:   Agitar CTO Alberto Savoia presented “Beyond JUnit: The Future of Developer Testing for Java” at JavaOne 2004. He attracted a standing-room only crowd of more than 600 interested developers.
                  Aug 2, 2004:     Kent Beck, the creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme programming joined Agitar, becoming the first Agitar Software Fellow.  
                  July 23, 2004:  Upon Agitar's invitation, Tao Xie visited Agitar and gave a presentation on "Automated Software Testing with Inferred Program Properties".
                  June 29, 2004:   Agitar’s Agitator won 2004 Duke’s Choice Award at JavaOne Developer Conference.
                  Dec 6, 2003:    The tools in our ASE 03 paper were highlighted in the testdriven.com newsletter #1.
   
  Tao Xie and David Notkin. Tool-Assisted Unit Test Selection Based on Operational Violations. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2003), Montreal, Canada, pp. 40-48, Oct. 2003. [PDF][BibTex][Slides] (Nominated for the Best Paper Award) ©2003 IEEE. An extended version to appear in a special issue of Automated Software Engineering Journal. [PDF][BibTex]

• Generating tests for an object-oriented program typically involves two tasks: generating relevant receiver-object states and generating relevant method arguments. Existing specification-based test generation tools such as Korat and TestEra rely on specifications such as class invariants to determine whether their directly constructed receiver-object states are valid. However, specifications often don't exist in practice. In our TACAS 05 paper, we have developed new techniques and a supporting tool, called Symstra, for indirectly constructing valid and relevant receiver-object states through method sequences, without requiring any specifications. To address the issues of state explosion and relevant-argument generation, we have defined symbolic states of object-oriented programs (produced by symbolic execution) and novel comparisons of symbolic states. Experimental results showed that the tool generates tests that achieve higher structural coverage faster than the existing tools. The Automated Software Engineering group at NASA Ames Research Center implemented a modified version of our Symstra techniques on top of Java PathFinder, a model checker and test-input generator for Java, and found the techniques to be effective in Java Pathfinder’s test-input generation. The Foundations of Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research has also implemented the Symstra techniques in their test-generation tools for C#.

  Tao Xie, Darko Marinov, Wolfram Schulte, and David Notkin. Symstra: A Framework for Generating Object-Oriented Unit Tests using Symbolic Execution. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2005), Edinburgh, U.K., pp. 365-381, April 2005. [PDF][BibTex]