A Variability Perspective of Mutation Analysis

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Abstract

Mutation testing is an effective technique for either improving or generating fault-finding test suites. It creates defective or incorrect program artifacts of the program under test and evaluates the ability of test suites to reveal them. Despite being effective, mutation is costly since it requires assessing the test cases with a large number of defective artifacts. Even worse, some of these artifacts are behaviourally "equivalent" to the original one and hence, they unnecessarily increase the testing effort. We adopt a variability perspective on mutation analysis. We model a defective artifact as a transition system with a specific feature selected and consider it as a member of a mutant family. The mutant family is encoded as a Featured Transition System, a compact formalism initially dedicated to model-checking of software product lines. We show how to evaluate a test suite against the set of all candidate defects by using mutant families. We can evaluate all the considered defects at the same time and isolate some equivalent mutants. We can also assist the test generation process and eciently consider higher-order mutants.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 22Nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
Place of PublicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherACM Press
Pages841-844
Number of pages4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Nov 2014
Event22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '14) - , Hong Kong
Duration: 16 Nov 201421 Nov 2014

Publication series

NameFSE 2014
PublisherACM

Conference

Conference22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '14)
Country/TerritoryHong Kong
Period16/11/1421/11/14

Keywords

  • Featured Transition Systems
  • Mutation Testing

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