National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.91318301, No.61202080);Guangxi Cloud Computing and Big Data Collaborative Innovation Center, Guangxi Colleges and University Key Laboratory of Cloud Computing and Complex Systems (No.YD16508)
QIAN Gen-nan, WANG Ya-wen, GONG Yun-zhan, et al. A Method for Finding Redundant Mutants in Mutation Testing[J]. Acta Electronica Sinica, 2017, 45(8): 1970-1975.
DOI:
QIAN Gen-nan, WANG Ya-wen, GONG Yun-zhan, et al. A Method for Finding Redundant Mutants in Mutation Testing[J]. Acta Electronica Sinica, 2017, 45(8): 1970-1975. DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.0372-2112.2017.08.023.
A Method for Finding Redundant Mutants in Mutation Testing
Mutation testing is an effective fault-based testing method.However
the application of mutation testing in engineering development has been restricted by the high testing costs caused by a large number of redundant mutants.Regarding the mutants arising from the sequential statements in a program
an algorithm based on propagation-infection-execution (PIE) model was proposed
which employs the interval abstract domain to represent program state and the interval algorithm to evaluate the redundancy relation between the mutants.Meanwhile
regarding the conditional statements in a program
the redundant mutant selection algorithms based on the predicate fault hierarchy are also presented.The algorithms are designed for simple predicate and compound predicate respectively.By analyzing the effects of these algorithms
the constrained boundary condition for the development of non-redundant mutants under the condition of stratified sampling is concluded.Siemens Test Suite and other three open source projects are used to conduct experiments to compare the proposed method with random selection method.Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the mutant testing time cost while maintaining a high mutation score.