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Related papers: Practical Mutation Testing at Scale

200 papers

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

Mutation testing has been widely used to assess the fault-detection effectiveness of a test suite, as well as to guide test case generation or prioritization. Empirical studies have shown that, while mutants are generally representative of…

We propose a new test case prioritization technique that combines both mutation-based and diversity-based approaches. Our diversity-aware mutation-based technique relies on the notion of mutant distinguishment, which aims to distinguish one…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-01-24 Donghwan Shin , Shin Yoo , Mike Papadakis , Doo-Hwan Bae

On-board embedded software developed for spaceflight systems (space software) must adhere to stringent software quality assurance procedures. For example, verification and validation activities are typically performed and assessed by third…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Oscar Cornejo , Fabrizio Pastore , Lionel Briand

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

Mutation testing was proposed to identify weaknesses in test suites by repeatedly generating artificially faulty versions of the software (mutants) and determining if the test suite is sufficient to detect them (kill them). When the tests…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Hang Du , Vijay Krishna Palepu , James A. Jones

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 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 testing has shown great promise in assessing the effectiveness of test suites while exhibiting additional applications to test-case generation, selection, and prioritization. Traditional mutation testing typically utilizes a set of…

Mutation analysis is one of the most effective, but costly means of assessing the ability of software test suites to prevent bugs. Traditional mutation analysis involves producing and evaluating syntactic variants of the original to check…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Rahul Gopinath , Philipp Goerz

Mutation testing is used to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites. In recent years, a promising variation called extreme mutation testing emerged that is computationally less expensive. It identifies methods where their functionality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Maik Betka , Stefan Wagner

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However, despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant computational…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-14 Rainer Niedermayr , Stefan Wagner

Mutation testing may be used to guide test case generation and as a technique to assess the quality of test suites. Despite being used frequently, mutation testing is not so commonly applied in the mobile world. One critical challenge in…

Mutation testing can be used to assess the fault-detection capabilities of a given test suite. To this aim, two characteristics of mutation testing frameworks are of paramount importance: (i) they should generate mutants that are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Michele Tufano , Jason Kimko , Shiya Wang , Cody Watson , Gabriele Bavota , Massimiliano Di Penta , Denys Poshyvanyk

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 shown remarkable capabilities in processing both natural and programming languages, which have enabled various applications in software engineering, such as requirement engineering, code generation, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Ziyu Li , Donghwan Shin

Fuzzing is one of the fastest growing fields in software testing. The idea behind fuzzing is to check the behavior of software against a large number of randomly generated inputs, trying to cover all interesting parts of the input space,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Rahul Gopinath , Philipp Görz , Alex Groce

Fuzzing is an important method to discover vulnerabilities in programs. Despite considerable progress in this area in the past years, measuring and comparing the effectiveness of fuzzers is still an open research question. In software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Philipp Görz , Björn Mathis , Keno Hassler , Emre Güler , Thorsten Holz , Andreas Zeller , Rahul Gopinath

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

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