Design of a modified concolic testing algorithm with smaller constraints

Concolic testing is a well-known unit test generation technique. However, bottlenecks such as constraint solving prevents concolic testers to be used in large projects. We propose a modification to a standard concolic tester. Our modification makes more but smaller queries to the constraint solver, i.e. ignores some path conditions. We show that it is possible to reach the same branch coverage as the standard concolic tester while decreasing the burden on the constraint solver. We support our claims by testing several C programs with our method. Experimental results show that our modification improves runtime performance of the standard concolic tester in half of the experiments and results in more than 5x speedup when the unit under test has many infeasible paths.