An Investigation of Compression Techniques to Speed up Mutation Testing

An Investigation of Compression Techniques to Speed up Mutation Testing

Zhu, Q. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Panichella, Annibale (University of Luxembourg)
Zaidman, A.E. (TU Delft Software Engineering)

2018

Mutation testing is widely considered as a high-end test coverage criterion due to the vast number of mutants it generates. Although many efforts have been made to reduce the computational cost of mutation testing, in practice, the scalability issue remains. In this paper, we explore whether we can use compression techniques to improve the efficiency of strong mutation based on weak mutation information. Our investigation is centred around six mutation compression strategies that we have devised. More specifically, we adopt overlapped grouping and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to cluster mutants and test cases based on the reachability (code coverage) and necessity (weak mutation) conditions. Moreover, we leverage mutation knowledge (mutation locations and mutation operator types) during compression. To evaluate our method, we conducted a study on 20 open source Java projects using manually written tests. We also compare our method with pure random sampling and weak mutation. The overall results show that mutant compression techniques are a better choice than random sampling and weak mutation in practice: they can effectively speed up strong mutation 6.3 to 94.3 times with an accuracy of >90%.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b948036b-5780-44ee-9772-a8859bc81210

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICST.2018.00035

IEEE

2022-07-04

978-1-5386-5012-7

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST)

11th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops, ICSTW 2018, 2018-04-09 → 2018-04-13, Vasteras, Sweden

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 Q. Zhu, Annibale Panichella, A.E. Zaidman