Exploring hybrid approach for mutant reduction in software testing

Abstract

Testing is necessary because we all make mistakes. Some of those mistakes can be ignored, but some mistakes are expensive; therefore it's required to check everything and anything we produce because things can always go wrong. Software Testing can be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a computer program/ application/product works as expected. Mutation testing falls under white box testing that measures the effectiveness of the test cases. It is fault based technique where fault is seeded into the original program to create set of faulty programs; also called as mutant and provide Mutation Score (MS); which is used to determine the sufficiency of the test cases. Mutation testing is used to increase the coverage and effectiveness of the test cases but because of its high cost of executing mutant it was not widely used. There are different Mutant Reduction Techniques which have been proposed to reduce the number of Mutant generated. In this paper a new hybrid approach is proposed that may reduce more number of mutants.