Test generation via Dynamic Symbolic Execution for mutation testing

Zhang, Lingming; Xie, Tao; Zhang, Lu; Tillmann, Nikolai; Halleux, Jonathan de; Mei, Hong

doi:10.1109/icsm.2010.5609672

Cited by 100 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Mutation adequacy is more stringent than statement or branch coverage [9]. There has been much research into test generation for mutation adequacy [35] [36] [37] [38], but our work is the first to optimise and select subdomains from which efficient test cases can be sampled.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting Highly Efficient Sets of Subdomains for Mutation Adequacy

Patrick

Alexander

Manuel

et al. 2013

2013 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)

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Abstract-Test selection techniques are used to reduce the human effort involved in software testing. Most research focusses on selecting efficient sets of test cases according to various coverage criteria for directed testing. We introduce a new technique to select efficient sets of subdomains from which new test cases can be sampled at random to achieve a high mutation score. We first present a technique for evolving multiple subdomains, each of which target a different group of mutants. The evolved subdomains are shown to achieve an average 160% improvement in mutation score compared to random testing with six real world Java programs. We then present a technique for selecting sets of the evolved subdomains to reduce the human effort involved in evaluating sampled test cases without reducing their fault finding effectiveness. This technique significantly reduces the number of subdomains for four of the six programs with a negligible difference in mutation score.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting Highly Efficient Sets of Subdomains for Mutation Adequacy

Patrick

Alexander

Manuel

et al. 2013

2013 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)

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“…Finally, we determine all the dominated mutant branches by the above statistical approach. The automated analysis of the dominance relation between mutant branches will be a significant research task in our near future work, and related work such as Kurtz et al [46], Kintis and Malevris [52], Offutt and Pan [53], and Zhang et al [54] will be of great help in achieving this goal. Furthermore, we find that different branches have different numbers of dominated branches.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutant reduction based on dominance relation for weak mutation testing

Gong

Zhang

Yao

et al. 2017

Information and Software Technology

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractContext: As a fault-based testing technique, mutation testing is effective at evaluating the quality of existing test suites. However, a large number of mutants result in the high computational cost in mutation testing. As a result, mutant reduction is of great importance to improve the efficiency of mutation testing. Objective: We aim to reduce mutants for weak mutation testing based on the dominance relation between mutant branches. Method: In our method, a new program is formed by inserting mutant branches into the original program. By analyzing the dominance relation between mutant branches in the new program, the non-dominated one is obtained, and the mutant corresponding to the non-dominated mutant branch is the mutant after reduction. Results: The proposed method is applied to test ten benchmark programs and six classes from open-source projects.The experimental results show that our method reduces over 80% mutants on average, which greatly improves the efficiency of mutation testing. Conclusion: We conclude that dominance relation between mutant branches is very important and useful in reducing mutants for mutation testing.

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“…Jia and Harman recently surveyed mutation analysis for programs and other software engineering artifacts [16]. One point from their survey is that automatic test generation for mutation analysis, a key step towards bringing mutation analysis to standard industrial practice, has recently been the subject of renewed attention in the literature [12,31,32,39]. The statement-level operators have been fairly stable since the Mothra project [26], with the only major change being from the selective operator study [33], where it was found that using five Mothra mutation operators would yield tests that killed most other mutants.…”

Section: Improving Logic-based Testing With Mutationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving logic-based testing

Kaminski

Ammann

Offutt

2013

Journal of Systems and Software

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Logic-based testers design tests from logical expressions that appear in software artifacts such as source code, design models, and requirements specifications. This paper presents three improvements to logic-based test design. First, in the context of mutation testing, we present fault hierarchies for the six relational operators. Applying the ROR mutation operator causes each relational operator to generate seven mutants per clause. The fault hierarchies show that only three of these seven mutants are needed. Second, we show how to bring the power of the ROR operator to logic-based test criteria such as the widely used Multiple Condition-Decision Coverage (MCDC) test criterion. Third, we present theoretical results supported by empirical data that show that the more recent coverage criterion of minimal-MUMCUT can find significantly more faults than MCDC. The paper has three specific recommendations: (1) Change the way the ROR mutation operator is defined in existing and future mutation systems; (2) Augment logic-based test criteria to incorporate relational operator replacement from mutation; (3) Replace the use of MCDC with minimal-MUMCUT, both in practice and in standards documents like FAA-DO178B.

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Test generation via Dynamic Symbolic Execution for mutation testing

Cited by 100 publications

References 41 publications

Selecting Highly Efficient Sets of Subdomains for Mutation Adequacy

Selecting Highly Efficient Sets of Subdomains for Mutation Adequacy

Mutant reduction based on dominance relation for weak mutation testing

Improving logic-based testing

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