Symbolic Execution and Constraint Solving

Executive Summary

Symbolic execution has garnered a lot of attention in recent years as an effective technique for generating high-coverage test suites, finding deep errors in complex software applications, and more generally as one of the few techniques that is useful across the board in myriad software engineering applications. While key ideas behind symbolic execution were introduced more than three decades ago, it was only recently that these techniques became practical as a result of significant advances in constraint satisfiability and scalable combinations of concrete and symbolic execution. The result has been an explosion in applications of symbolic execution techniques in software engineering, security, formal methods and systems research. Furthermore, researchers are combining symbolic execution with traditional program analysis techniques in novel ways to address longstanding software engineering problems. This in turn has led to rapid developments in both constraint solvers and symbolic execution techniques, necessitating an in-depth exchange of ideas between researchers working on solvers and symbolic techniques, best accomplished through dedicated workshops.

Hence, one of the main goals of this Dagstuhl seminar was to bring together leading researchers in the fields of symbolic execution and constraint solving, foster greater communication between these two communities and discuss new research directions in these fields. The seminar had 34 participants from Canada, France, Germany, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and United States, from both academia, research laboratories, and the industry. More importantly, the participants represented several different communities, with the topics of the talks and discussions reflecting these diverse interests: testing, verification, security, floating point constraint solving, hybrid string-numeric constraints, debugging and repair, education, and commercialization, among many others.