A new approach to program testing

The current approach for testing a program is, in principle, quite primitive. Some small sample of the data that a program is expected to handle is presented to the program. If the program produces correct results for the sample, it is assumed to be correct. Much current work focuses on the question of how to choose this sample. We propose that a program can be more effectively tested by executing it "symbolically." Instead of supplying specific constants as input values to a program being tested, one supplies symbols. The normal computational definitions for the basic operations performed by a program can be expanded to accept symbolic inputs and produce symbolic formulae as output. If the flow of control in the program is completely independent of its input parameters, then all output values can be symbolically computed as formulae over the symbolic inputs and examined for correctness. When the control flow of the program is input dependent, a case analysis can be performed producing output formulae for each class of inputs determined by the control flow dependencies. Using these ideas, we have designed and implemented an interactive debugging/testing system called EFFIGY.