Six ways to automatically find software bugs

With the rapid development of hardware and the emerging of smart devices like smart phones and wearable gadgets, software, the soul of those devices, becomes more and more important. However, program bugs, which often cause system failure and misbehaviors, is one of the most severe stumbling blocks for even further development of those technologies. Since automatically detecting all bugs in a program is generally undecidable[9], many novel techniques emerged to conquer this program from different aspects and with different tradeoffs. Many of these techniques are commercialized and hence further prove their practical value. In this report, we survey six representative classes of them, and discuss their advantages and limitations.