Impact of mutation operators on the ratio of equivalent mutants

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2018

Abstract

Software mutation is a widely used technique of software testing that consists in generating variants of a base program by applying standard modifications to its source code. One of the main obstacles in the use of software mutations is the existence of equivalent mutants, i.e. mutants whose behavior is indistinguishable from the base program, even though their source code is distinct. Despite several decades of research, the identification of equivalent mutants remains an open problem. Rather than attempting to identify individual mutants that are equivalent to the base, we argue that it is often sufficient to estimate the number of equivalent mutants; also, we argue that the number of equivalent mutants depends on two factors that must be considered in the estimation effort, namely the base program and the mutation operators that are used; in this paper, we explore the impact of mutation operators on the number of equivalent mutants.

Identifier

85063399914 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781614998990]

Publication Title

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-900-3-664

e-ISSN

18798314

ISSN

09226389

First Page

664

Last Page

677

Volume

303

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