Representation dependence testing using program inversion

The definition of a data structure may permit many different concrete representations of the same logical content. A (client) program that accepts such a data structure as input is said to have a representation dependence if its behavior differs for logically equivalent input values. In this paper, we present a methodology and tool for automated testing of clients of a data structure for representation dependence. In the proposed methodology, the developer expresses the logical equivalence by writing a normalization program f that maps each concrete representation to a canonical one. Our solution relies on automatically synthesizing the oneto-many inverse function of f: given an input value x, we can generate multiple test inputs logically equivalent to x by executing the inverse with the canonical value f(x) as input repeatedly. We present an inversion algorithm for restricted classes of normalization programs including programs mapping arrays to arrays in a typical iterative manner....

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Aditya Kanade, Rajeev Alur, Sriram K. Rajamani, Ganesan Ramanlingam
• Keywords: Data Structures, Input Value, Representation Dependence, SIGSOFT 2010, Software Engineering