Concolic Testing

« previous post | next post »

… doesn't mean something like "having a shared case of colitis" (which was my first guess), but rather, as Wikipedia explains:

Concolic testing (a portmanteau of concrete and symbolic) is a hybrid software verification technique that performs symbolic execution, a classical technique that treats program variables as symbolic variables, along a concrete execution (testing on particular inputs) path. Symbolic execution is used in conjunction with an automated theorem prover or constraint solver based on constraint logic programming to generate new concrete inputs (test cases) with the aim of maximizing code coverage. Its main focus is finding bugs in real-world software, rather than demonstrating program correctness.

I learned this because of department-wide email congratulations sent to my Penn colleague Mayur Naik, whose paper "Automated concolic testing of smartphone apps" was selected for the ESEC/FSE 2022 Test of Time Award.

Concolic has made it into Wiktionary, but has not had its Word Induction Ceremony at Merriam-Webster or the OED, despite its 6,590 hits on Google Scholar.

My excuse for ignorance in this case is that software verification is not a field that I follow closely. But still, I should have known.

October 26, 2022 @ 8:00 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Words words words

Permalink