How to Kill Them All: An Exploratory Study on the Impact of Code Observability on Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is well-known for its efficacy in assessing test quality, and starting to be applied in the industry. However, what should a developer do when confronted with a low mutation score? Should the test suite be plainly reinforced to increase the mutation score, or should the production code be improved as well, to make the...

Massively Parallel, Highly Efficient, but What about the Test Suite Quality? Applying Mutation Testing to GPU Programs

Thanks to rapid advances in programmability and performance, GPUs have been widely applied in High Performance Computing (HPC) and safety-critical domains. As such, quality assurance of GPU applications has gained increasing attention. This brings us to mutation testing, a fault-based testing technique that assesses the test suite quality by...

An Investigation of Compression Techniques to Speed up Mutation Testing

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...

A Systematic Literature Review of How Mutation Testing Supports Quality Assurance Processes

Mutation testing has been very actively investigated by researchers since the 1970s, and remarkable advances have been achieved in its concepts, theory, technology, and empirical evidence. While the most influential realisations have been summarised by existing literature reviews, we lack insight into how mutation testing is actually applied....

Mutation Testing for Physical Computing

Physical computing, which builds interactive systems between the physical world and computers, has been widely used in a wide variety of domains and applications, e.g., the Internet of Things (IoT). Although physical computing has witnessed enormous realisations, testing these physical computing systems still face many challenges, such as...

Speeding-Up Mutation Testing via Data Compression and State Infection

Mutation testing is widely considered as a high-end test criterion due to the vast number of mutants it generates. Although many efforts have been made to reduce the computational cost of mutation testing, its scalability issue remains in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to speed up mutation testing based on state...