Btrax - an automated coverage test tool

February 17, 2009

Report from Presenter

Sufficient software testing is necessary to improve the quality of software products. Coverage test is one of the test techniques, which ensures that the software runs correctly with the test data to execute every instruction in the program once at least. In the conventional methods for coverage test, it is required to rebuild the binary of the target software with probes to capture information of the executed code, and to execute the test with it.　This causes a problem that we cannot test the binary to be released.

We propose Btrax, which is able to execute coverage test without modifying the target program. Btrax traces the execution of branch instruction using a debug facility in the processor and detects the executed parts of the program. Then, it automatically calculates the coverage rate from the results. The execution is traced at the hardware level, so Btrax can be applied to libraries and Linux kernel as well as to applications.
Btrax is open source software, and is available in Linux environments on Intel Pentium 4 processors or later.

(By Satoshi Oshima, Systems Development Laboratory)

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