Evaluating Mutation Testing Alternatives: A Collateral Experiment

Kintis, Marinos; Papadakis, Mike; Malevris, Nicos

doi:10.1109/apsec.2010.42

Cited by 89 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…These mutants are harder to kill than most of the foms and thus, one should aim at them only, ignoring most of the foms. In other studies [8], [23] it was shown that sampling second order mutants based on various strategies produces tests with a 10% loss on the fault revealing ability while reducing the number of the produced equivalent mutants by a 80-90%. In this study, second order mutants were employed in order to provide information about the first order ones they are composed of.…”

Section: Higher Order Mutationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Isolating First Order Equivalent Mutants via Second Order Mutation

Kintis

Papadakis

Malevris

2012

2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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Abstract-In this paper, a technique named I-EQM, able to dynamically isolate first order equivalent mutants, is proposed. I-EQM works by employing a novel dynamic execution scheme that integrates both first and second order mutation. The proposed approach combines the -impact‖ on the program execution of the first order mutants with the -impact‖ on the output of second order ones, to isolate likely to be first order equivalent mutants. Experimental results on a benchmark set of manually classified mutants, selected from real word programs, reveals that I-EQM achieves to classify equivalent mutants with a 71% and 82% classification precision and recall respectively. These results improve the previously proposed approaches by selecting (retrieving) a considerably higher number of killable mutants with only a limited loss on the classification precision.

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Section: Higher Order Mutationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Isolating First Order Equivalent Mutants via Second Order Mutation

Kintis

Papadakis

Malevris

2012

2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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“…The actual differences are thin and are due to the selection procedure. Disjoint mutants are a subset with minimum joint killings, approximated through a greedy heuristic [1], [6]. Surface mutants [12] are also approximated by a similar heuristic.…”

Section: B Set-based Mqismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, good mutants are those that are killed by different test cases than other mutants. This means that the selected set of mutants is as much disjoint, in terms of their killing condition, as possible [6]. In other words, disjoint mutants have a minimum overlap between the mutants' killings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutant Quality Indicators

Papadakis

Chekam

Traon

2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)

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Abstract-The question of which are the valuable mutants has received little attention in mutation testing literature. Naturally, the choice of mutants impacts the quality of the performed analysis and has the potential of changing the conclusions of empirical studies. To this end, we collect definitions related to mutant quality indicators and analyses their relations. We identify two classes of indicators, related to individual mutants (Fault Revealing, Subsuming, Hard-to-kill and Stubborn) and to mutant sets (disjoint/dominator and distinguished). We analyse a large set of mutants from 3,902 (real) faulty program versions, belonging to 40 fault classes, collected from an on-line programming contest. Our analysis categorises mutants as valuable, according to the studied quality indicators, profiles their types and examines the relations between them. Our results suggest that there is a large disagreement between the indicators and that the connection between mutant type, its quality and its ability to reveal faults is weak. Additionally, our paper reveal that the ability of mutants to uncover faults differs significantly across the different fault classes and that some mutant types are well linked (or completely disconnected) to specific fault classes.

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“…Their method gets a high reduction rate [43]. Kintis et al generated SOMs based on the control relations among nodes in the CFG of a program [33]. Their research demonstrates that there exists subsumption between mutants.…”

Section: Testability Transformation and Mutant Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second-order mutants (SOMs, two syntactic changes in a program) proposed by Polo et al get 50% cost saving [32]. Kintis et al focused on control relations among nodes in the CFG of a program, and presented three strategies for combining SOMs [33]. Papadakis and Malevris conducted an empirical study for the first and the second order mutation testing strategies, and found that the first order mutation testing strategies are generally more effective than the second order ones, and the latter drastically reduce equivalent mutants, thus forming a valid cost effective alternative to mutation testing [34].…”

Section: Mutant Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutant reduction based on dominance relation for weak mutation testing

Gong

Zhang

Yao

et al. 2017

Information and Software Technology

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractContext: As a fault-based testing technique, mutation testing is effective at evaluating the quality of existing test suites. However, a large number of mutants result in the high computational cost in mutation testing. As a result, mutant reduction is of great importance to improve the efficiency of mutation testing. Objective: We aim to reduce mutants for weak mutation testing based on the dominance relation between mutant branches. Method: In our method, a new program is formed by inserting mutant branches into the original program. By analyzing the dominance relation between mutant branches in the new program, the non-dominated one is obtained, and the mutant corresponding to the non-dominated mutant branch is the mutant after reduction. Results: The proposed method is applied to test ten benchmark programs and six classes from open-source projects.The experimental results show that our method reduces over 80% mutants on average, which greatly improves the efficiency of mutation testing. Conclusion: We conclude that dominance relation between mutant branches is very important and useful in reducing mutants for mutation testing.

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Evaluating Mutation Testing Alternatives: A Collateral Experiment

Cited by 89 publications

References 23 publications

Isolating First Order Equivalent Mutants via Second Order Mutation

Isolating First Order Equivalent Mutants via Second Order Mutation

Mutant Quality Indicators

Mutant reduction based on dominance relation for weak mutation testing

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