TY - GEN
T1 - Sufficient mutation operators for measuring test effectiveness
AU - Namin, Akbar Siami
AU - Andrews, James H.
AU - Murdoch, Duncan J.
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - Mutants are automatically-generated, possibly faulty variants of programs. The mutation adequacy ratio of a test suite is the ratio of non-equivalent mutants it is able to identify to the total number of non-equivalent mutants. This ratio can be used as a measure of test effectiveness. However, it can be expensive to calculate, due to the large number of different mutation operators that have been proposed for generating the mutants. In this paper, we address the problem of finding a small set of mutation operators which is still sufficient for measuring test effectiveness. We do this by defining a statistical analysis procedure that allows us to identify such a set, together with an associated linear model that predicts mutation adequacy with high accuracy. We confirm the validity of our procedure through cross-validation and the application of other, alternative statistical analyses.
AB - Mutants are automatically-generated, possibly faulty variants of programs. The mutation adequacy ratio of a test suite is the ratio of non-equivalent mutants it is able to identify to the total number of non-equivalent mutants. This ratio can be used as a measure of test effectiveness. However, it can be expensive to calculate, due to the large number of different mutation operators that have been proposed for generating the mutants. In this paper, we address the problem of finding a small set of mutation operators which is still sufficient for measuring test effectiveness. We do this by defining a statistical analysis procedure that allows us to identify such a set, together with an associated linear model that predicts mutation adequacy with high accuracy. We confirm the validity of our procedure through cross-validation and the application of other, alternative statistical analyses.
KW - Mutation analysis
KW - Testing effectiveness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=57349122337&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1368088.1368136
DO - 10.1145/1368088.1368136
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:57349122337
SN - 9781605580791
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
SP - 351
EP - 360
BT - ICSE'08
T2 - 30th International Conference on Software Engineering 2008, ICSE'08
Y2 - 10 May 2008 through 18 May 2008
ER -