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Related papers: Does mutation testing improve testing practices?

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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

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

In mutation testing, the quality of a test suite is evaluated by introducing faults into a program and determining whether the program's tests detect them. Most existing approaches for mutation testing involve the application of a fixed set…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Frank Tip , Jonathan Bell , Max Schaefer

In the field of mutation analysis, mutation is the systematic generation of mutated programs (i.e., mutants) from an original program. The concept of mutation has been widely applied to various testing problems, including test set…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Donghwan Shin , Doo-Hwan Bae

Mutation testing is a standard technique to evaluate the quality of a test suite. Due to its computationally intensive nature, many approaches have been proposed to make this technique feasible in real case scenarios. Among these…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-07-11 Ali Parsai , Alessandro Murgia , Serge Demeyer

Mutation analysis is an effective technique to evaluate a test suite adequacy in terms of revealing unforeseen bugs in software. Traditional source- or IR-level mutation analysis is not applicable to the software only available in binary…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Mohsen Ahmadi , Pantea Kiaei , Navid Emamdoost

Context: Performance regressions negatively impact execution time and memory usage of software systems. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate the effectiveness of performance test suites. Performance mutation…

Security has become, nowadays, a major concern for the organizations as the majority of its applications are exposed to Internet, which increases the threats of security considerably. Thus, the solution is to improve tools and mechanisms to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2013-09-25 Mohammed Ennahbaoui , Said Elhajji

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

Software testing is the important phase of software development process. But, this phase can be easily missed by software developers because of their limited time to complete the project. Since, software developers finish their software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2010-02-11 Mrs. R. Jeevarathinam , Dr. Antony Selvadoss Thanamani

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

Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-23 Rainer Niedermayr , Elmar Juergens , Stefan Wagner

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate plausible test code. Intuitively they generate this by imitating tests seen in their training data, rather than reasoning about execution semantics. However, such reasoning is important when…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Philipp Straubinger , Marvin Kreis , Stephan Lukasczyk , Gordon Fraser

Quantum software testing has attracted interest in recent years, prompting the development of various techniques to automate the testing of quantum software. These techniques generate test cases that must be assessed for their effectiveness…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Eñaut Mendiluze Usandizaga , Thomas Laurent , Paolo Arcaini , Shaukat Ali

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

Unit tests play a vital role in uncovering potential faults in software. While tools like EvoSuite focus on maximizing code coverage, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shifted attention toward LLM-based test generation.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Guancheng Wang , Qinghua Xu , Lionel Briand , Kui Liu

Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Philipp Straubinger , Gordon Fraser

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

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 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…