Browse > Article

An Equivalent Mutation Detection Method for Class-Level Mutation Analysis  

Jang, Won-Ho (KAIST)
Ma, Yu-Seung (ETRI)
Kwon, Yong-Rae (KAIST)
Abstract
Mutation testing is known as a very useful technique for measuring the effectiveness of a test data set and finding weak points of the test set. An equivalent mutant degrades the effectiveness of mutation testing. Elimination of equivalent mutants is a very important problem in mutation testing.In this paper, we proposed kinds of methods for detecting class-level equivalent mutants. These methods judge the equivalency of mutants through structural informations and behavioral information of the original program and mutants using static analysis. We found that our approach can detect not a few of equivalent mutants and expected that the cost of mutation testing can be saved considerably.
Keywords
testing; mutation analysis; equivalent mutant;
Citations & Related Records
연도 인용수 순위
  • Reference
1 A. J. Offutt and W. M. Craft. Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, volume 4 issue 3, pp.131-154, 1994.   DOI
2 A. J. Offutt and J. Pan. Automatically detecting equivalent mutants and infeasible paths. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, volume 7, pp.165-192, 1997.   DOI   ScienceOn
3 R. Hierons, M. Harman and S. Danicic. Using program slicing to assist in the detection of equivalent mutants. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, volume 9, pp.233-262, 1999.   DOI   ScienceOn
4 Y. S. Ma, M. J. Harrold and Y. R. Kwon. Evaluation of mutation testing for object-oriented programs. ICSE'06, May 20-28, 2006.
5 Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, Dependency Graph, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_graph
6 P. Wegner and S. B. Zdonik. Inheritance as an incremental modification mechanism or what like is and isn't like. Proceedings of ECOOP'88, pages 55-77, 1988.
7 Y. S. Ma, Y. R. Kwon and A. J. Offutt. Inter-class mutation operators for Java. Proceedings of the 13 th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering(ISSRE'02), 2002.
8 Y. S. Ma, A. J. Offutt and Y. R. Kwon. MuJava: an automated class mutation system. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, volume 15, pp.97-133, 2005.   DOI   ScienceOn
9 A. J. Offutt, Y. S. Ma and Y. R. Kwon. The class-level mutants of MuJava. Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Automation of software test, pp.78-84, 2006.
10 J. H. Andrews, L. C. Briand and Y. Labiche. Is mutation an appropriate tool for testing experiments? Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, pp.402-411, 2005.
11 A. J. Offutt, J. Pan, K. Tewary and T. Zhang. An experimental evaluation of data flow and mutation testing. Software Practice and Experience, 26: 165-176, 1996.   DOI
12 P. G. Frankl, S. N. Weiss and C. Hu. All-uses vs mutation testing: An experimental comparison of effectiveness. J. Systems software 1997, 38:235-253, 1997.   DOI   ScienceOn