Mutant reduction based on dominance relation for weak mutation testing

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• 作者：Dunwei Gong^a ; ^b ; ^{dwgong@vip.163.com" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Gongjie Zhang ; ^c ; ^e ; ^{zhanggongjie@126.com" class="auth_mail" title="E-mail the corresponding author} ; Xiangjuan Yao^d ; Fanlin Meng^f
• 关键词：Software testing ; Weak mutation testing ; Mutant ; Reduction ; Dominance relation
• 刊名：Information and Software Technology
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：81
• 期：Complete
• 页码：82-96
• 全文大小：1131 K

文摘

Context: As a fault-based testing technique, mutation testing is effective at evaluating the quality of existing test suites. However, a large number of mutants result in the high computational cost in mutation testing. As a result, mutant reduction is of great importance to improve the efficiency of mutation testing.

Objective: We aim to reduce mutants for weak mutation testing based on the dominance relation between mutant branches.

Method: In our method, a new program is formed by inserting mutant branches into the original program. By analyzing the dominance relation between mutant branches in the new program, the non-dominated one is obtained, and the mutant corresponding to the non-dominated mutant branch is the mutant after reduction.

Results: The proposed method is applied to test ten benchmark programs and six classes from open-source projects. The experimental results show that our method reduces over 80% mutants on average, which greatly improves the efficiency of mutation testing.

Conclusion: We conclude that dominance relation between mutant branches is very important and useful in reducing mutants for mutation testing.