Mutant Selecting According to the Nondominated Original Statements

Abstract

Mutation testing is a technique for evaluating the quality of a test suite. However, the costly computation from a large number of mutants affects the practical application of mutation testing, and reducing the number of mutants is reasonably an efficient way for mutation testing. We propose a new method for reducing mutants by analyzing dominance between statements in the program under test. The proposed method only selects the mutants generated from the nondominated statements, and the mutants generated from the dominated statements are reduced. After applying the proposed method to nine programs, the experimental results show that our method reduces over 75% mutants and well maintains the mutation adequacy.