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Detecting Equivalent Mutants by Means of Constraint Systems

Authors:
Simona Nica
Mihai Nica
Franz Wotawa

Keywords: Mutation Testing; Equivalent Mutants; Mutation Score; Constraint Satisfaction Problem; Distinguishing Test Case.

Abstract:
Mutation testing has been used along the research community as an efficient method to evaluate the process of software testing, i.e., the quality of the test suite. One major drawback is represented by the equivalent mutant problem. Through this current research we aim to come with a reliable solution to this problem and improve the available test suite pool. We do this by combining the mutation testing procedure together with a constraint satisfaction paradigm and the concept of distinguishing test cases. Mutation testing has been seen, in most of the cases, as a measure for evaluating the quality of a user’s test suite. But, also mutation testing can be of great help in the test case generation process. By means of a constraint system we generate test scenarios able to distinguish between two different versions of a program. We start from the hypothesis that when our constraint system is not able to find any solution it might be the case that two equivalent mutants were encountered. The first empirical results, i.e. an increased mutation score, encourage us to further apply the strategy on medium size applications.

Pages: 21 to 24

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: October 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4316

ISBN: 978-1-61208-168-7

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 23, 2011 to October 29, 2011