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Mutants as Patches: Towards a formal approach to Mutation Testing

Lewowski Tomasz, Madeyski Lech

Foundations of Computing and Decision Sciences

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2019

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Vol. 44, No. 4

379--405

EN

Background: Mutation testing is a widely explored technique used to evaluate the quality of software tests, but little attention has been given to its mathematical foundations. Aim: We provide a formal description of the core concepts in mutation testing, relations between them and conclusions that can be drawn from the presented model. Method: We introduce concepts of mutant space and patch space, and refer to patch merging procedure from the patch theory. We explicitly present constraints, such as location-dependence, that affect mutation operators. We also present a way to use introduced formalism with traditional operators proposed in other papers. Results: The proposed formalism allows to describe interactions between separate mutations using well-known abstract algebra notation. Conclusion: The presented formalism may substantially decrease the number of tested weak mutants and increase the number of valuable ones, while giving tools to partially address the problem of equivalent mutants, particularly for higher-order mutation testing. However, additional empirical evaluation is still needed.

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Parallel Mutant Execution Techniques in Mutation Testing Process for Simulink Models

Hanh L. T. M., Binh N. T., Tung K. T.

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology

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2017

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nr 4

90--100

EN

Mutation testing – a fault-based technique for software testing – is a computationally expensive approach. One of the powerful methods to improve the performance of mutation without reducing effectiveness is to employ parallel processing, where mutants and tests are executed in parallel. This approach reduces the total time needed to accomplish the mutation analysis. This paper proposes three strategies for parallel execution of mutants on multicore machines using the Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT) with the Matlab Distributed Computing Server. It aims to demonstrate that the computationally intensive software testing schemes, such as mutation, can be facilitated by using parallel processing. The experiments were carried out on eight different Simulink models. The results represented the efficiency of the proposed approaches in terms of execution time during the testing process.

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Mutation Churn Model

Mnich M., Roman A., Wawrzyniak P.

Schedae Informaticae

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2016

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Vol. 25

227--236

EN

Mutation testing is considered as one of the most effective quality improvement technique by assessing the strength of the actual test suite. If no test is able to kill a given mutant, this means that the tests are not strong enough and we need to write additional one that will be able to kill this mutant. However, mutation testing is very time consuming. In this paper we investigate if it is possible to reduce the scope of the mutation analysis by running it only on the new or changed part of the code. Using data from the real open-source projects we analyze if there is a relation between mutation scope reduction and effectiveness of the mutation analysis.

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Reducing the Number of Higher-order Mutants with the Aid of Data Flow

Ghiduk A. S.

e-Informatica Software Engineering Journal

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2016

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Vol. 10, nr 1

31--49

EN

Higher-order mutants are created by injecting two or more mutations into the original program, while first-order mutants are generated by seeding single faults in the original program. Mutant generation is a key stage of mutation testing which is computationally very expensive, especially in the case of higher-order mutants. Although many mutation testing techniques have been developed to construct the first-order mutants, a very small number of techniques have been presented to generate the higher-order mutants because of the exponential growth of the number of higher-order mutants, and the coupling effect between higher-order and first-order mutants. To overcome the exponential explosion in the number of higher-order mutants considered, this paper introduces a new technique for generating a reduced set of higher-order mutants. The proposed technique utilizes a data-flow analysis to decrease the number of mutation points through the program under test and consequently reduce the number of higher-order mutants. In this technique only positions of defs and uses are considered as locations to seed the mutation. The generated set of higher-order mutants consists of a reduced number of mutants, which reduces the costs of higher-order mutation testing. In addition, the proposed technique can generate the higher-order mutants directly without generating the first-order mutants or by combining two or more first-order mutants. A set of experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The results of the conducted experiments are presented and compared with the results of the related work. These results showed that the proposed technique is more effective than the earlier techniques in generating higher-order mutants without affecting the efficiency of mutation testing.