Concolic testing is a fully automatic software testing technique that combines concrete and symbolic execution of a program unit in an attempt to explore all the code paths in this unit or at least explore all its paths up to a depth bound. In this talk, we will describe how concolic testing can be applicable to high-level languages in general and to functional programming languages in particular. For such languages, the concolic engine needs to efficiently support pattern matching, recursive data types such as lists, recursion and higher-order functions. We will also briefly talk about the engineering effort that concolic testing tools require, in particular in interfacing with SMT solvers.

Time permitting, the talk will also include a demo of CutEr (as in “more cute”), a concolic testing tool for Erlang and some of the bugs in the implementation of Erlang/OTP that CutEr has discovered.