Automated Software Testing for the 21st Century

During the last decade, research on automating software testing using
program analysis has experienced quite a resurgence. The first part of
this talk will present an overview of recent advances on automatic
code-driven test generation. This approach to software testing
combines techniques from static program analysis (symbolic execution),
dynamic analysis (testing and runtime instrumentation), model checking
(systematic state-space exploration), and automated constraint solving
(SMT solvers). Notably, this approach has been implemented in the
Microsoft tool SAGE, which was credited to have found roughly one
third of all the security vulnerabilities discovered by file fuzzing
during the development of Microsoft's Windows 7. The second part of
the talk will discuss current trends in the software industry, and
their impact on software testing.