Authors:
Mike Papadakis
;
Nicos Malevris
and
Marinos Kintis
Affiliation:
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
Keyword(s):
Mutation testing, Weak mutation, Higher order mutation, Collateral coverage.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Programming Languages
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Engineering Methods and Techniques
;
Software Testing and Maintenance
Abstract:
Mutation Testing is considered to be one of the most powerful techniques for unit testing and at the same time one of the most expensive. The principal expense of mutation is the vast number of imposed test requirements, many of which cannot be satisfied. In order to overcome these limitations, researchers have proposed many cost reduction techniques, such as selective mutation, weak mutation and a novel approach based on mutant combination, which combines first order mutants to generate second order ones. An experimental comparison involving weak mutation, strong mutation and various proposed strategies was conducted. The experiment shows that all proposed approaches are quite effective in general as they result in high collateral coverage of strong mutation (approximately 95%), while recording remarkable effort savings. Additionally, the results suggest that some of the proposed approaches are more effective than others making it possible to reduce the mutation testing application
cost with only a limited impact on its effectiveness.
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