Combining Static Analysis and Test Generation for {C} Program Debugging

International audienceSoftware validation remains crucial in software development process. Traditionally viewed as separate domains, static and dynamic analysis have complementary strengths and weaknesses and can be both applied to program validation and verification. This paper presents our ongoing work on a tool prototype called SANTE (Static ANalysis and TEsting), implementing a combination of static analysis and structural program tetsting for detection of run-time errors in C programs. First, a static analysis tool (Frama-C) is called to generate alarms when it cannot ensure the absence of run-time errors. Second, these alarms guide a structural test generation tool (PathCrawler) trying to confirm alarms by activating bugs on some test cases. Our experiments on real-life software show that this combination can outperform the use of each technique independently