Efficiency of mutation operators and selective mutation strategies: An empirical study

Software Testing Verification and Reliability

Volumn 9, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 205-232

  Mresa, Elfurjani S ^a   Bottaci, Leonardo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HULL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MATHEMATICAL OPERATORS; SOFTWARE ENGINEERING;

MUTATION OPERATORS; SELECTIVE MUTATION TESTING; SOFTWARE TESTING;

COMPUTER SOFTWARE SELECTION AND EVALUATION;

EID: 0033327169     PISSN: 09600833     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1689(199912)9:4<205::AID-STVR186>3.0.CO;2-X     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Acree, A. T. (1980) 'On mutation', Ph.D. thesis, School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
2. Acree, A. T., Budd, T. A., DeMillo, R. A., Lipton, R. J. and Sayward, F. G. (1979) 'Mutation analysis', Technical Report GIT-ICS-79/08, School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
3. Borse, G. J. (1991) Fortran 77 and Numerical Methods for Engineers, PWS-Kent, Boston, Massachu-setts, U.S.A.
4. Budd, T. A. (1980) 'Mutation analysis of program test data', Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.
5. Choi, B., Mathur, A. P. and Pattison, B. (1989) 'PMothra: scheduling mutants for execution on a hypercube', Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT'89: Third Symposium on Software Testing, Analysis and Verification (TAV3), Key West, Florida, U.S.A., December 1989, ACM Press, New York, U.S.A., pp. 58-65.
6. DeMillo, R. A., Guindi, D. S., King, K. N., McCracken, W. M. and Offutt, A. J. (1988) 'An extended overview of the Mothra software testing environment', Proceedings - Second Workshop on Software Testing, Verification and Analysis, Banff, Alberta, Canada, July 1988, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, U.S.A., pp. 142-151.
7. DeMillo, R. A., Lipton, R. J. and Sayward, F. G. (1978) 'Hints on test data selection: help for the practising programmer', IEEE Computer, 11(4), 34-41.
8. DeMillo, R. A. and Offutt, A. J. (1991) 'Constraint-based automatic test data generation', IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 17(9), 900-910.
9. DeMillo, R. A. and Spafford, E. H. (1986) 'The Mothra software testing environment', Proceedings of the 11th NASA Software Engineering Laboratory Workshop, Goddard Space Center, U.S.A.
10. Duncan, I. M. (1993) 'Strong mutation testing strategies', Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, U.K.
11. Hamlet, R. G. (1977) 'Testing programs with the aid of a compiler', IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 3(4), 279-290.
12. King, K. N. and Offutt, A. J. (1991) 'A Fortran language system for mutation based software testing', Software - Practice and Experience, 21(7), 685-718.
13. Lipton, R. J. and Sayward, F. G. (1978) 'The status of research on program mutation', Digest for the Workshop on Software Testing and Test Documentation, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S.A., December 1978, pp. 355-373.
14. Mathur, A. P. (1991) 'Performance, effectiveness, and reliability issues in software testing', Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), Tokyo, Japan, September 1991, pp. 604-605.
15. Mathur, A. P. and Wong, W. E. (1993) 'Reducing the cost of mutation testing: an empirical study', Technical Report SERC-TR-138-p, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A.
16. Mathur, A. P. and Wong, W. E. (1994) 'An empirical comparison of data flow and mutation-based test adequacy criteria', Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 4(1), 9-31.
17. Mresa, E. S. (1997) 'On the efficiency of selective mutation for software testing', Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Hull, U.K.
18. Offutt, A. J. (1991) 'An integrated automatic test data generation system', Journal of Systems Integration, 1(3), 391-409.
19. Offutt, A. J. (1992) 'Investigations of the software testing coupling effect', ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 1(1), 5-20.
20. Offutt, A. J. and Lee, S. D. (1994) 'An empirical evaluation of weak mutation', IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 20(5), 337-344.
21. Offutt, A. J., Lee, A., Rothermel, G., Untch, R. H. and Zapf, C. (1996a) 'An experimental determination of sufficient mutant operators', ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 5(2), 99-118.
22. Offutt, A. J. and Pan, J. (1997) 'Automatically detecting equivalent mutants and infeasible paths', Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 7(3), 165-192.
23. Offutt, A. J., Pan, J., Tewary, K. and Zhang, T. (1996b) 'An experimental evaluation of data flow and mutation testing', Software - Practice and Experience, 26(2), 165-176.
24. Offutt, A. J., Rothermel, G. and Zapf, C. (1993) 'An experimental evaluation of selective mutation', Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Engineering, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., May 1993, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, U.S.A., pp. 100-107.
25. Voas, J., Morell, L. and Miller, K. (1991) 'Predicting where faults can hide from testing', IEEE Software, 8(2), 41-48.
26. Voas, J. M. (1992) 'PIE: a dynamic failure-based technique', IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 18(8), 717-727.
27. Voas, J. M. and Miller, K. W. (1992) 'The revealing power of a test case', Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 2(1), 25-42.
28. Voas, J. M. and Miller, K. W. (1993) 'Semantic metrics for software testability', Journal of Systems and Software, 20(3), 207-216.
29. Weiss, S. N. and Fleyshgakker, V. N. (1993) 'Improved serial algorithms for mutation analysis', Proceedings of the 1993 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 1993), Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., June 1993, ACM Press, New York, U.S.A., pp. 149-158.
30. Wong, W. E., Horgan, J. R., London, S. and Mathur, A. P. (1998) 'Effect of test set minimization on fault detection effectiveness', Software - Practice and Experience, 28(4), 347-369.