TY - GEN
T1 - A Variability Perspective of Mutation Analysis
AU - Devroey, Xavier
AU - Perrouin, Gilles
AU - Cordy, Maxime
AU - Papadakis, Mike
AU - Legay, Axel
AU - Schobbens, Pierre-Yves
PY - 2014/11/16
Y1 - 2014/11/16
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Featured Transition Systems
KW - Mutation Testing
U2 - 10.1145/2635868.2666610
DO - 10.1145/2635868.2666610
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - FSE 2014
SP - 841
EP - 844
BT - Proceedings of the 22Nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
PB - ACM Press
CY - New York, NY, USA
T2 - 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '14)
Y2 - 16 November 2014 through 21 November 2014
ER -