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SUMMARYMutation testing is a successful testing technique based on fault injection. However, it can be very costly and several cost-reduction techniques for reducing the number of mutants have been proposed in the literature. Cost reduction can be aided by an analysis of mutation operators, but this requires the definition of specialized metrics. Several metrics have been proposed before, though their effectiveness and relative merits are not easy to assess. A step-ahead in the evaluation of mutation-reduction techniques would be a better metric to determine objectively the quality of a set of mutants with respect to a given test-suite. This work introduces such a metric, which is naturally extended to mutation operators and may be used to reduce the number of mutants, particularly of equivalent mutants. Finally, a firm mutation analysis tool for WS-BPEL service compositions is presented and experimental results obtained by comparing different metrics on several compositions are presented.

Business processes based in WS-BPEL compositions are rapidly becoming commonplace in recent years, so it is important to pay special attention to testing in this context. Mutation testing is a white-box testing technique that has been applied successfully to programs written in several languages. In order to apply it we need a system for mutant generation. This paper presents the first results of applying a new system, GAmera, for automatic mutant generation for WS-BPEL compositions. It is composed by three different elements: an analyzer, a mutant generator and a system that executes and evaluates the mutants. GAmera is based in genetic algorithms and attempts to minimize the number of generated mutants, independently of the number and type of mutation operators, without losing relevant information. It can also detect potentially equivalent mutants allowing to improve the quality of the test suite.

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