Using Constraints for Equivalent Mutant Detection

Nica, Simona Alina; Wotawa, Franz

doi:10.4204/eptcs.86.1

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(15 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…mutants Adamopoulos et al [29] 2004 ----Reduce Co-evolution can help in reducing the effects of eq. mutants Grun et al [30] 2009 Nica and Wotawa [34] implemented a similar constraintbased approach to detect equivalent mutants and demonstrated that many equivalent mutants can be detected. Voas and McGraw [26] suggested that program slicing can help in detecting equivalent mutants.…”

Section: B Equivalent Mutantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trivial Compiler Equivalence: A Large Scale Empirical Study of a Simple, Fast and Effective Equivalent Mutant Detection Technique

Papadakis

Jia

Harman

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

132

166

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Identifying equivalent mutants remains the largest impediment to the widespread uptake of mutation testing. Despite being researched for more than three decades, the problem remains. We propose Trivial Compiler Equivalence (TCE) a technique that exploits the use of readily available compiler technology to address this long-standing challenge. TCE is directly applicable to real-world programs and can imbue existing tools with the ability to detect equivalent mutants and a special form of useless mutants called duplicated mutants. We present a thorough empirical study using 6 large open source programs, several orders of magnitude larger than those used in previous work, and 18 benchmark programs with hand-analysis equivalent mutants. Our results reveal that, on large real-world programs, TCE can discard more than 7% and 21% of all the mutants as being equivalent and duplicated mutants respectively. A humanbased equivalence verification reveals that TCE has the ability to detect approximately 30% of all the existing equivalent mutants.

show abstract

Section: B Equivalent Mutantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trivial Compiler Equivalence: A Large Scale Empirical Study of a Simple, Fast and Effective Equivalent Mutant Detection Technique

Papadakis

Jia

Harman

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

132

166

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Mutation Schemata technique [34] was originally developed in order to factorize the compilation costs of hundreds of similar mutants. Static analysis has been proposed for the "equivalent mutant detection" problem [21], [20] in a way similar to what is sketched in Section VII.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Leveraging of Symbolic Execution to Advanced Coverage Criteria

Bardin

Kosmatov

François

2014

2014 IEEE Seventh International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Automatic test data generation (ATG) is a major topic in software engineering. In this paper, we seek to bridge the gap between the coverage criteria supported by symbolic ATG tools and the most advanced coverage criteria found in the literature. We define a new testing criterion, label coverage, and prove it to be both expressive and amenable to efficient automation. We propose several innovative techniques resulting in an effective black-box support for label coverage, while a direct approach induces an exponential blow-up of the search space. Initial experiments show that ATG for label coverage can be achieved at a reasonable cost and that our optimisations yield very significant savings.

show abstract

“…Often enough faults are injected into constructed software and then corresponding mutants are distinguished [4,5]. In this paper, we propose to derive distinguishing sequences not for code but for two EFSMs injecting faults into the template Java implementation of the specification EFSM.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the tool Java [8] a number of mutants is generated for the template EFSM implementation which are tested using the initial test suite derived by covering appropriate paths in the specification EFSM. If a mutant is not detected by the initial test suite then a corresponding fault is easily mapped into an EFSM fault and a distinguishing sequence is derived not for two software programs that is known to be a very complex task [5] but for two finite state models that is known to be much simpler [9,10]. First results have been published in [11]; in this paper, we extend a proposed approach to arbitrary EFSMs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing the Fault Coverage of Tests Derived Against Extended Finite State Machines

Yevtushenko¹,

Ermakov²

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) are widely used when deriving tests for checking whether a software implementation meets functional requirements. These tests usually are derived keeping in mind appropriate test purposes such as covering paths, variables, etc. of the specification EFSM. However, it is well known that such tests do not detect many functional faults in an EFSM implementation. In this paper, we propose an approach for increasing the fault coverage of test suites initially derived against the specification EFSM. For this reason, the behavior of the specification EFSM is implemented in Java using a template that is very close to the EFSM description. At the next step, the fault coverage of an initial test suite derived against the specification EFSM is calculated with respect to faults generated by µJava tool. Since the EFSM software implementation is template based, each undetected fault can be easily mapped into a mutant EFSM of the specification machine. Thus, a distinguishing sequence can be derived not for two programs that is very complex but for two machines and there are efficient methods for deriving such a distinguishing sequence for Finite State Machine (FSM) abstractions of EFSMs. As an FSM abstraction, an l-equivalent of an EFSM can be considered that in fact, is a subtree of the successor tree of height l that describes the EFSM behavior under input sequences of length up to l. Such l-equivalents are classical FSMs and if l is not large then a distinguishing sequence can be derived simply enough. The initial test suite augmented with such distinguishing sequences detects much more functional faults in software implementations of a system described by the specification EFSM.

show abstract

Using Constraints for Equivalent Mutant Detection

Cited by 20 publications

References 16 publications

Trivial Compiler Equivalence: A Large Scale Empirical Study of a Simple, Fast and Effective Equivalent Mutant Detection Technique

Trivial Compiler Equivalence: A Large Scale Empirical Study of a Simple, Fast and Effective Equivalent Mutant Detection Technique

Efficient Leveraging of Symbolic Execution to Advanced Coverage Criteria

Increasing the Fault Coverage of Tests Derived Against Extended Finite State Machines

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About