Toward Rigorous Object-Code Coverage Criteria

Taejoon Byun, Vaibhav Sharma, Sanjai Rayadurgam, Stephen McCamant, Mats P. E. Heimdahl

  • Read: 02 May 2025
  • Published: 23 Oct 2017

2017 IEEE 28th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)

https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE.2017.33

See also: Discovering instructions for robust binary-level coverage criteria

Q&A (link)

What are the motivations for this work?

  • See Abstract.
  • To address the need for a robust object coverage criterion, this paper proposes a rigorous definition of OBC such that it captures well the semantics of source code branches for a given instruction set architecture.

What is the proposed solution?

  • See Abstract.
  • A rigorous definition of OBC (called Flag-Use Object Branch Coverage) to capture the semantics of source code branches for a given instruction set architecture.
  • Define Flag-Use Instruction and Flag-Use Object Branch Coverage.
    • Flag-Use Instruction: Any instruction that reads the value of one or more flag registers is called a Flag-Use Instruction.
    • Flag-Use Object Branch Coverage: A test- suite is said to achieve Flag-Use Object Branch Coverage (Flag-Use OBC) if for each Flag-Use Instruction in the object- code, if each distinct behavior of the instruction that is conditional on the flag values read, is exercised by some test- case in the test-suite.

What is the work’s evaluation of the proposed solution?

See Section 4.

What is your analysis of the identified problem, idea and evaluation?

NONE

What are the contributions?

  • See Abstract, Introduction.
  • A rigorous definition of OBC (called Flag-Use Object Branch Coverage) to capture the semantics of source code branches for a given instruction set architecture.

What are future directions for this research?

  • See Introduction.
  • Flag-Use OBC is sensitive to the structure of the object-code—albeit far less so than OBC—and the fault- finding ability of test suites satisfying Flag-Use OBC (as well as MC/DC for that matter) is not as strong as one would like.

What questions are you left with?

NONE

What is your take-away message from this paper?

NONE

Written on