Symbolic execution was originally defined for programs in the 1970s as a way to analyze feasible paths of programs under analysis and, jointly with solving techniques, to generate test cases for partition structural testing. The scope of programming languages that can be analyzed by tools based on this technique has been extended during the following decades. Symbolic execution has been transposed at the modeling level, to analyze possible executions of models in various modelling languages.
Symbolic execution allows computing program or model semantics and representing them efficiently in an abstract manner. As such they form a very interesting basis to build formal methods upon them. Symbolic execution has been used as a base for implementing structural testing or model based testing algorithms, refinement testing, model or program debugging techniques (deadlock search, invariant checking), model-checking introducing first order structure. The growing interest on symbolic execution, inducing a growing community of users, is also motivated by the fact that the scalability of this technique has increased thanks to recent advances that have been made in constraint solving techniques.
Although the number of contributors to symbolic execution techniques and the number of its users increase, the different communities working with this technique do not have a common place to share ideas, discuss new challenges, future developments, other usage scenarios, feedbacks on case studies, scalability… USE aims at being a forum to cover those needs, both for researchers and practitioners working on symbolic execution and its applications.
USE 2018 is aimed at encouraging the exchange of ideas and discussions between participants interested in symbolic execution and related topics. USE 2018 will be organized around several invited talks given by experts of the considered domains, several accepted talks based on a lightweight reviewing of submitted extended abstracts, and will feature space for questions and discussions.