Mutation based test case generation via a path selection strategy

Information and Software Technology

Volumn 54, Issue 9, 2012, Pages 915-932

  Papadakis, Mike ^a,b   Malevris, Nicos ^a  

^a ATHENS UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS   (Greece)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LUXEMBOURG   (Luxembourg)

Author keywords

Adequacy criterion; Infeasible paths; Mutation testing; Path testing; Software testing; Unit testing

Indexed keywords

ADEQUACY CRITERION; INFEASIBLE PATHS; MUTATION TESTING; PATH TESTING; UNIT TESTING;

TESTING;

SOFTWARE TESTING;

EID: 84861947491     PISSN: 09505849     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2012.02.004     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. R.G. Hamlet Testing programs with the aid of a compiler IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 3 1977 279 290
2. R.A. DeMillo, R.J. Lipton, and F.G. Sayward Hints on test data selection: help for the practicing programmer Computer 11 1978 34 41
3. A.J. Offutt, J. Pan, K. Tewary, and T. Zhang An experimental evaluation of data flow and mutation testing Softw. Pract. Exper. 26 1996 165 176
4. N. Li, U. Praphamontripong, A.J. Offutt, An experimental comparison of four unit test criteria: mutation, edge-pair, all-uses and prime path coverage, in: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis (MUTATION'09), Denver, Colorado, 2009, pp. 220-229.
5. A.J. Offutt, and R.H. Untch Mutation 2000: uniting the orthogonal Mutation Testing for the New Century 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers 34 44
6. N. Malevris, and D.F. Yates The collateral coverage of data flow criteria when branch testing Inf. Softw. Technol. 48 2006 676 686
7. D.F. Yates, and N. Malevris An objective comparison of the cost effectiveness of three testing methods Inf. Softw. Technol. 49 2007 1045 1060
8. W.E. Howden Weak mutation testing and completeness of test sets IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 8 1982 371 379
9. M.R. Woodward, and M.A. Hennell On the relationship between two control-flow coverage criteria: all JJ-paths and MCDC Inf. Softw. Technol. 48 2006 433 440
10. R.S. Boyer, B. Elspas, and K.N. Levitt SELECT a formal system for testing and debugging programs by symbolic execution SIGPLAN Not. 10 1975 234 245
11. J.C. King Symbolic execution and program testing Commun. ACM 19 1976 385 394
12. P. McMinn Search-based software test data generation: a survey Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 14 2004 105 156
13. A. Baars, M. Harman, Y. Hassoun, K. Lakhotia, P. McMinn, P. Tonella, T. Vos, Symbolic search-based testing, in: 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2011, pp. 53-62.
14. D. Yates, N. Malevris, Reducing the effects of infeasible paths in branch testing, in: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT '89 Third Symposium on Software Testing, Analysis, and Verification, ACM, Key West, FL, USA, 1989, pp. 48-54.
15. M. Papadakis, N. Malevris, An effective path selection strategy for mutation testing, in: Proceedings of the 16th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society, 2009, pp. 422-429.
16. Y. Jia, M. Harman, An Analysis and Survey of the Development of Mutation Testing, Technical, Report, 2010.
17. Y. Jia, and M. Harman Higher order mutation testing Inf. Softw. Technol. 51 2009 1379 1393
18. Y. Jia, and M. Harman An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 99 2010
19. A.J. Offutt, and S.D. Lee An empirical evaluation of weak mutation IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 20 1994 337 344
20. M.R. Woodward, K. Halewood, From weak to strong, dead or alive? An analysis of some mutation testing issues, in: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Software Testing, Verification, and Analysis, 1988, pp. 152-158.
21. R.A. DeMillo, and A.J. Offutt Constraint-based automatic test data generation IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 17 1991 900 910
22. H.N. Gabow, S.N. Maheshwari, and L.J. Osterweil On two problems in the generation of program test paths IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 2 1976 227 231
23. T.A. Budd, and D. Angluin Two notions of correctness and their relation to testing Acta Inform. 18 1982 31 45
24. A.J. Offutt, and J. Pan Automatically detecting equivalent mutants and infeasible paths Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 7 1997 165 192
25. R.M. Hierons, M. Harman, and S. Danicic Using program slicing to assist in the detection of equivalent mutants Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 9 1999 233 262
26. M. Papadakis, and N. Malevris Automatically performing weak mutation with the aid of symbolic execution, concolic testing and search-based testing Softw. Qual. J. 19 2011 691 723
27. G. Fraser, and A. Zeller Mutation-driven generation of unit tests and oracles IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 2011 1-1
28. M. Harman, Y. Jia, W.B. Langdon, Strong higher order mutation-based test data generation, in: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium and the 13th European Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering, ACM, Szeged, Hungary, 2011, pp. 212-222.
29. M. Papadakis, N. Malevris, Automatic mutation test case generation via dynamic symbolic execution, in: IEEE 21st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), 2010, pp. 121-130.
30. Y.-S. Ma, J. Offutt, and Y.R. Kwon MuJava: an automated class mutation system Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 15 2005 97 133
31. K.N. King, and A.J. Offutt A Fortran language system for mutation-based software testing Softw. Pract. Exper. 21 1991 685 718
32. A.J. Offutt, A. Lee, G. Rothermel, R.H. Untch, and C. Zapf An experimental determination of sufficient mutant operators ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 5 1996 99 118
33. R.H. Untch, A.J. Offutt, M.J. Harrold, Mutation analysis using mutant schemata, in: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis, ACM, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1993, pp. 139-148.
34. R.A. DeMillo, E.W. Krauser, A.P. Mathur, Compiler-integrated program mutation, in: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'91), Tokyo, Japan, 1991, pp. 351-356.
35. A.J. Offutt, Z. Jin, and J. Pan The dynamic domain reduction procedure for test data generation Softw. Pract. Exper. 29 1999 167 193
36. K. Ayari, S. Bouktif, G. Antoniol, Automatic mutation test input data generation via ant colony, in: Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, ACM, London, England, 2007, pp. 1074-1081.
37. M. Papadakis, N. Malevris, An empirical evaluation of the first and second order mutation testing strategies, in: Third International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshops (ICSTW), 2010, pp. 90-99.
38. E.J. Weyuker More experience with data flow testing IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 19 1993 912 919
39. D.F. Yates, M.A. Hennell, An approach to branch testing, in: 11th International Workshop on Graph Theoretic Techniques in Computer Science, Wurtzburg, 1985.
40. lp-solve, in. Available from: .
41. C. Koutsikas, and N. Malevris A new script language applicable to symbolic execution systems Int. J. Comput. Appl. 28 2006 1 11
42. C. Koutsikas, N. Malevris, A unified symbolic execution system, in: Proceedings of the ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications, IEEE Computer Society, 2001, pp. 466.
43. M. Papadakis, N. Malevris, A symbolic execution tool based on the elimination of infeasible paths, in: Proceedings of the 2010 Fifth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances, IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 435-440.
44. J. Offutt, S. Liu, A. Abdurazik, and P. Ammann Generating test data from state-based specifications Softw. Test. Verif. Reliab. 13 2003 25 53
45. M. Papadakis, Methods for Detecting Errors in Java Programs with the Use of Mutation Testing Method, MSc thesis, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece, June 2005 (in Greek).
46. R.A. DeMillo, D.S. Guindi, K.N. King, W.M. McCracken, A.J. Offutt, An extended overview of the Mothra software testing environment, in: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Software Testing, Verification, and Analysis (TVA'88), Banff Alberta, Canada, 1988, pp. 142-151.
47. S. Lapierre, E. Merlo, G. Savard, G. Antoniol, R. Fiutem, P. Tonella, Automatic unit test data generation using mixed-integer linear programming and execution trees, in: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE Computer Society, 1999, pp. 189.
48. C. Pasareanu, and W. Visser A survey of new trends in symbolic execution for software testing and analysis Int. J. Softw. Tools Technol. Transfer (STTT) 11 2009 339 353
49. C. Cadar, P. Godefroid, S. Khurshid, C.S. Pasareanu, K. Sen, N. Tillmann, W. Visser, Symbolic execution for software testing in practice. preliminary assessment, in: Proceeding of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ACM, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, 2011, pp. 1066-1071.
50. A. Kiezun, V. Ganesh, P.J. Guo, P. Hooimeijer, M.D. Ernst, HAMPI: a solver for string constraints, in: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ACM, Chicago, IL, USA, 2009, pp. 105-116.
51. N. Kosmatov, All-paths test generation for programs with internal aliases, in: Proceedings of the 2008 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, 2008, pp. 147-156.
52. S.C. Ntafos, S.L. Hakimi, On path cover problems in digraphs and applications to program testing, IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. SE-5 (1979) 520-529.
53. R. Santelices, P.K. Chittimalli, T. Apiwattanapong, A. Orso, M.J. Harrold, Test-suite augmentation for evolving software, in: Proceedings of the 2008 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, 2008, pp. 218-227.
54. T. Ball, J.R. Larus, Efficient path profiling, in: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, IEEE Computer Society, Paris, France, 1996, pp. 46-57.
55. C.S. Pasareanu, N. Rungta, W. Visser, Symbolic execution with mixed concrete-symbolic solving, in: Proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ACM, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2011, pp. 34-44.
56. S.R. Vergilio, J.C. Maldonado, and M. Jino Infeasible paths in the context of data flow based testing criteria: identification, classification and prediction J. Braz. Comp. Soc. 12 2006 71 86