Related papers: Does mutation testing improve testing practices?

Mutation analysis assesses a test suite's adequacy by measuring its ability to detect small artificial faults, systematically seeded into the tested program. Mutation analysis is considered one of the strongest test-adequacy criteria.…

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…

Mutation testing has been demonstrated to be one of the most powerful fault-revealing tools in the tester's tool kit. Much previous work implicitly assumed it to be sufficient to re-compute mutant suites per release. Sadly, this makes…

When software evolves, opportunities for introducing faults appear. Therefore, it is important to test the evolved program behaviors during each evolution cycle. We conduct an exploratory study to investigate the properties of…

To assess the quality of a test suite, one can rely on mutation testing, which computes whether the overall test cases are adequately exercising the covered lines. However, this high level of granularity may overshadow the quality of…

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…

Traditionally, mutation testing generates an abundance of small deviations of a program, called mutants. At industrial systems the scale and size of Facebook's, doing this is infeasible. We should not create mutants that the test suite…

Mutation testing is a well-established technique for assessing a test suite's quality by injecting artificial faults into production code. In recent years, mutation testing has been extended to machine learning (ML) systems, and deep…

Mutation testing has been widely accepted as an approach to guide test case generation or to assess the effectiveness of test suites. Empirical studies have shown that mutants are representative of real faults; yet they also indicated a…

Mutation testing is an approach to check the robustness of test suites. The program code is slightly changed by mutations to inject errors. A test suite is robust enough if it finds such errors. Tools for mutation testing usually integrate…

Mutation analysis measures test suite adequacy, the degree to which a test suite detects seeded faults: one test suite is better than another if it detects more mutants. Mutation analysis effectiveness rests on the assumption that mutants…

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 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…

Mutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. Its application to real-world projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. However,…

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…

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…

It is crucial that smart contracts are tested thoroughly due to their immutable nature. Even small bugs in smart contracts can lead to huge monetary losses. However, testing is not enough; it is also important to ensure the quality and…

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…

Mutation testing is an effective technique for assessing the effectiveness of test suites by systematically injecting artificial faults into programs. However, existing mutation testing techniques fall short in capturing many types 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…