Generating Test Data for Programs with Flag Variables using Goal-oriented Concolic Testing

This paper presents a goal-oriented test data generation technique that specializes concolic testing. The proposed technique, referred to as GCT (Goal-oriented Concolic Testing) produces test inputs which execute a specific target. Concolic testing can be seen as the brute force approach to search the space of all possible paths until a required test input is found. In contrast, GCT restricts the number of program paths that are explored by using data flow information to identify statements that should be executed beforehand in order for the target to be executed. We conducted experiments to evaluate the performance of GCT with programs with flag variables to show its effectiveness.