Software code complexity is a well-studied property to determine software component health. However, the existing code complexity metrics do not directly take into account the fault-proneness aspect of the code. We propose a metric called mutant density where we use mutation as a method to introduce artificial faults in code, and count the number of possible mutations per line. We show how this metric can be used to perform helpful analysis of real-life software projects.
@article{arxiv.2104.12121,
title = {Mutant Density: A Measure of Fault-Sensitive Complexity},
author = {Ali Parsai and Serge Demeyer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12121},
year = {2021}
}