Improving test quality through resource reallocation

Abstract

Test program generation typically involves the resolution of constraints to make the tests legal and interesting for verification. This is often achieved through the values of resources used by the instructions in the test. The difficulty is that the number of available resources is limited, and there may be fewer available resources than needed values (especially in long tests). One way to get a large number of values from a limited number of resources, is to insert value-assigning instructions into the test before the instruction that is to use the resource's value. We refer to this as resource reloading. This paper presents a reloading technique that minimizes the interference caused. by the reloading instructions and avoids fixed code patterns by distancing the reloading instruction from the instruction that uses the resource value. The basic technique is presented along with several useful extensions and is compared with other reloading approaches.