Faster mutation testing inspired by test prioritization and reduction

Lingming Zhang, Darko Marinov, Sarfraz Khurshid

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Mutation testing is a well-known but costly approach for determining test adequacy. The central idea behind the approach is to generate mutants, which are small syntactic transformations of the program under test, and then to measure for a given test suite how many mutants it kills. A test t is said to kill a mutant m of program p if the output of t on m is different from the output of t on p. The effectiveness of mutation testing in determining the quality of a test suite relies on the ability to apply it using a large number of mutants. However, running many tests against many mutants is time consuming. We present a family of techniques to reduce the cost of mutation testing by prioritizing and reducing tests to more quickly determine the sets of killed and non-killed mutants. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2013 - Proceedings
Pages235-245
Number of pages11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event22nd International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2013 - Lugano, Switzerland
Duration: Jul 15 2013Jul 20 2013

Publication series

Name2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2013 - Proceedings

Other

Other22nd International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2013
Country/TerritorySwitzerland
CityLugano
Period7/15/137/20/13

Keywords

  • Mutation testing
  • Test Prioritization
  • Test Reduction

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Faster mutation testing inspired by test prioritization and reduction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this