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Related papers: Assessing and Improving the Mutation Testing Pract…

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Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for each and every…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Sten Vercammen , Mohammad Ghafari , Serge Demeyer , Markus Borg

Mutation testing is an established fault-based testing technique. It operates by seeding faults into the programs under test and asking developers to write tests that reveal these faults. These tests have the potential to reveal a large…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Ahmed Khanfir , Renzo Degiovanni , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

Quantum machine learning integrates the strengths of quantum computing and machine learning, enabling models to learn complex features using fewer parameters than their classical counterparts. Due to the increasing complexity of quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-04 Emma Andrews , Prabhat Mishra

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been used to generate mutants in both research work and in industrial practice. However, there has been no comprehensive empirical study of their performance for this increasingly important…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Bo Wang , Mingda Chen , Ming Deng , Youfang Lin , Mark Harman , Mike Papadakis , Jie M. Zhang

Mutant selection refers to the problem of choosing, among a large number of mutants, the (few) ones that should be used by the testers. In view of this, we investigate the problem of selecting the fault revealing mutants, i.e., the mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Thierry Titcheu Chekam , Mike Papadakis , Tegawendé Bissyandé , Yves Le Traon , Koushik Sen

Test Case Prioritization (TCP) is an important component of regression testing, allowing for earlier detection of faults or helping to reduce testing time and cost. While several TCP approaches exist in the research literature, a growing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-20 Qi Luo , Kevin Moran , Denys Poshyvanyk , Massimiliano Di Penta

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ali Parsai , Serge Demeyer

Mutation analysis is a well-established technique for assessing test quality in the traditional software development paradigm by injecting artificial faults into programs. Its application to deep learning (DL) has expanded beyond classical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Zaheed Ahmed , Philip Makedonski , Jens Grabowski

Mutation testing consists of evaluating how effective test suites are at detecting artificially seeded defects in the source code, and guiding the improvement of the test suites. Although mutation testing tools are increasingly adopted in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Philipp Straubinger , Alexander Degenhart , Gordon Fraser

Mutation analysis can provide valuable insights into both System Under Test (SUT) and its test suite. However, it is not scalable due to the cost of building and testing a large number of mutants. Predictive Mutation Testing (PMT) has been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Jinhan Kim , Juyoung Jeon , Shin Hong , Shin Yoo

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behav- ior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical sys- tems increasingly incorporate dynamic adaptation capabilities;…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2012-05-28 Alexandre Bartel , Benoit Baudry , Freddy Munoz , Jacques Klein , Tejeddine Mouelhi , Yves Le Traon

Mutation testing is a well-studied method for increasing the quality of a test suite. We designed LittleDarwin as a mutation testing framework able to cope with large and complex Java software systems, while still being easily extensible…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-07-06 Ali Parsai , Alessandro Murgia , Serge Demeyer

Background: Test flakiness is identified as a major issue that compromises the regression testing process of complex software systems. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic behaviour, send confusing signals to developers, and break their…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Sarra Habchi , Maxime Cordy , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

Mutation Testing is a fault-based software testing technique which is too computationally expensive for industrial use. Cloud-based distributed computing clusters, taking advantage of the MapReduce programming paradigm, represent a method…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-01-29 Robert Merkel , James Georgeson

Mutation analysis evaluates test suites and testing techniques by measuring how well they detect seeded defects (mutants). Even though well established in research, mutation analysis is rarely used in practice due to scalability problems…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2013-03-13 René Just , Michael D. Ernst , Gordon Fraser

We introduce $\mu$BERT, a mutation testing tool that uses a pre-trained language model (CodeBERT) to generate mutants. This is done by masking a token from the expression given as input and using CodeBERT to predict it. Thus, the mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Renzo Degiovanni , Mike Papadakis

Testing is an important aspect in professional software development, both to avoid and identify bugs as well as to increase maintainability. However, increasing the number of tests beyond a reasonable amount hinders development progress. To…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Alexandros Efremidis , Joshua Schmidt , Sebastian Krings , Philipp Körner

Industrial robotic systems (IRS) are increasingly deployed in diverse environments, where failures can result in severe accidents and costly downtime. Ensuring the reliability of the software controlling these systems is therefore critical.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Marcela Gonçalves dos Santos , Sylvain Hallé , Fábio Petrillo

Mutation testing is a powerful technique for assessing and improving test suite quality that artificially introduces bugs and checks whether the test suites catch them. However, it is also computationally expensive and thus does not scale…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Kush Jain , Uri Alon , Alex Groce , Claire Le Goues

The state-of-the-practice in software development is driven by constant change fueled by continuous integration servers. Such constant change demands for frequent and fully automated tests capable to detect faults immediately upon project…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ali Parsai , Serge Demeyer