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Quality Evaluation of Test Oracles Using Mutation

Authors:
Ana Claudia Maciel
Rafael Oliveira
Marcio Delamaro

Keywords: Test Oracles; Mutation Testing; Mutation Operators;

Abstract:
In software development, product quality is directly related to the quality of the development process. Therefore, Verification, Validation & Test (VV&T) activities performed through methods, techniques, and tools are needed for increasing productivity, quality, and cost reduction in software development. An essential point for the software testing activity is its automation, making it more reliable and less expensive. For the automation of testing activities, automated test oracles are crucial, representing a mechanism (program, process, or data) that indicates whether the output obtained for a test case is correct. In this paper,we use the concept of program mutation to create alternative implementations of oracles and evaluate their quality. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) propose specific mutation operators for oracles; (2) present a useful support tool for such mutation operators; and (3) establish an alternative to evaluate assertion-based test oracles. Through an empirical evaluation, our main finding is that mutations may help in assessing and improving the quality of test oracles, generating new oracles and/or test cases and decreasing the rate of test oracles errors.

Pages: 37 to 42

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: April 23, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8394

ISBN: 978-1-61208-553-1

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 23, 2017 to April 27, 2017