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.