Programs that interact with environments such as the file system and database
are a classical challenge for automated software testing. A common approach to
handling this problem is to insert an abstraction layer between the application
and the environment However, even with a well-defined abstraction layer, the
burden on the software developer or tester is still high: they have to
understand the subtleties of the environment to craft a meaningful set of test
cases. In this talk, I will present parameterized models for the file system and
database that can be used in conjunction with Pex, an automated test generation
tool using dynamic symbolic execution. This is the work I've done at MSR this
summer.