The effectiveness of mutation testing depends heavily on the types of faults that the mutation operators are designed to represent. Thus, the quality of the mutation operators is key to mutation testing. Although, mutation operators for object-oriented languages have previously been presented, little research has been done to show the usefulness of the class mutation operators. To assess the usefulness of class mutation operators, we conducted two empirical studies. In the first study, we examine the number and kinds of mutants that are generated for object-oriented programs. In the second study, we investigate the way in which class mutation operators model faults that are not detected by traditional mutation testing. We conducted our studies using a wellknown object-oriented system, BCEL.
Mutation is a powerful but complicated and computationally expensive testing method. Mutation is also a valuable experimental research technique that has been used in many studies. Mutation has been experimentally compared with other test criteria, and also used to support experimental comparisons of other test criteria, by using mutants as a method to create faults. In effect, mutation is often used as a "gold standard" for experimental evaluations of test methods. This paper presents a publicly available mutation system for Java that supports both traditional statementlevel mutants and newer inter-class mutants. MuJava can be freely downloaded and installed with relative ease under both Unix and Windows. MuJava is offered as a free service to the community and we hope that it will promote the use of mutation analysis for experimental research in software testing.
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