Impact of Mutation Operators on Mutant Equivalence

Imen Marsit, Mohamed Nazih Omri, JiMing Loh, Ali Mili

2018

Abstract

The presence of equivalent mutants is a recurrent source of aggravation in mutation-based studies of software testing, as it distorts our analysis and precludes assertive claims. But the determination of whether a mutant is equivalent to a base program is undecidable, and practical approaches are tedious, error-prone, and tend to produce insufficient or unnecessary conditions of equivalence. We argue that an attractive alternative to painstakingly identifying equivalent mutants is to estimate their number. This is an attractive alternative for two reasons: First, in most practical applications, it is not necessary to identify equivalent mutants individually; rather it suffices to know their number. Second, even when we need to identify equivalent mutants, knowing their number enables us to single them out with little to moderate effort.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Marsit I., Nazih Omri M., Loh J. and Mili A. (2018). Impact of Mutation Operators on Mutant Equivalence.In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-320-9, pages 21-32. DOI: 10.5220/0006833000210032

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft18,
author={Imen Marsit and Mohamed Nazih Omri and JiMing Loh and Ali Mili},
title={Impact of Mutation Operators on Mutant Equivalence},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2018},
pages={21-32},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006833000210032},
isbn={978-989-758-320-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Impact of Mutation Operators on Mutant Equivalence
SN - 978-989-758-320-9
AU - Marsit I.
AU - Nazih Omri M.
AU - Loh J.
AU - Mili A.
PY - 2018
SP - 21
EP - 32
DO - 10.5220/0006833000210032