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The article presents an overview of modern and classical symbolic execution techniques which are used in software testing to explore program paths and to find errors in complex software applications. The article notes the input values for symbolic execution are symbolic values, the values of a computer program's variables are symbolic expressions, and the computed output values represent a function of the input symbolic values. The challenges of symbolic execution such as path explosion, constraint solving, and memory modeling are also mentioned. Topics include execution-generated testing (EGT) and directed automated random testing (DART).

The article discusses software testing, looking at how testing can be used as a knowledge acquisition process instead of as a quality assurance activity. The author discusses how defects which are found during testing can be constructively applied to software and examines the concept of orders of ignorance. Information is provided on managing test complexity, what constitutes a successful test, and the transmission of information.