Mutation testing has been used to assess the quality of test case suites by analyzing the ability in distinguishing the artifact under testing from a set of alternative artifacts, the so-called mutants. The mutants are generated from the artifact under testing by applying a set of mutant operators, which produce artifacts with simple syntactical differences. The mutant operators are usually based on typical errors that occur during the software development and can be related to a fault model. In this paper, we propose a language—named View the MathML source (MUtant DEfinition Language)—for the definition of mutant operators, aiming not only at automating the mutant generation, but also at providing precision and formality to the operator definition. The proposed language is based on concepts from transformational and logical programming paradigms, as well as from context-free grammar theory. Denotational semantics formal framework is employed to define the semantics of the View the MathML source language. We also describe a system—named mudelgen—developed to support the use of this language. An executable representation of the denotational semantics of the language is used to check the correctness of the implementation of mudelgen. At the very end, a mutant generator module is produced, which can be incorporated into a specific mutant tool/environment.

Mutation testing has been shown to be one of the strongest testing criteria for the evaluation of both programs and test suites. Comprehensive sets of mutants require strong test sets to achieve acceptable testing coverage. Moreover, mutation operators are valuable for the evaluation of other testing approaches. Although its importance has been highlighted for Aspect-Oriented (AO) programs, there is still a need for a suitable set of mutation operators for AO languages. The quality of the mutation testing itself relies on the quality of such operators. This paper presents the design of a set of mutation operators for AspectJ-based programs. These operators model instances of fault types identified in an extensive survey. The fault types and respective operators are grouped according to the related languages features. We also discuss the generalisation of the fault types to AO approaches other than AspectJ and the coverage that may be achieved with the application of the proposed operators. In addition, a cost analysis based on two case studies involving real-world applications has provided us feedback on the most expensive operators, which will support the definition of further testing strategies.

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Mutation testing (MT) has been found to be effective at revealing faults. However, its high cost of application, due to the high number of mutants created and the effort to determine the equivalent ones, has motivated the proposition of alternative approaches for its application. One of them, named selective mutation, aims to reduce the number of generated mutants through a reduction in the number of mutant operators. A previous relevant study resulted in the proposition of a sufficient mutant operators set for FORTRAN, indicating that it is possible to have a large cost reduction in MT application, whilst preserving a high MT score. This work investigates procedures for the determination of a sufficient mutant operators set for C programs with the perspective of contributing to the establishment of low-cost, effective mutation-based testing strategies.

Mutation testing, originally proposed for unit testing, has been extended to integration testing with the proposition of the Interface Mutation criterion. This paper presents the results of an experiment using two mutation-based testing criteria for unit and integration testing phases: the Mutation Analysis and the Interface Mutation adequacy criteria, respectively. The aim is to investigate how they can be used in a complementary way during the testing activity, establishing an incremental testing strategy comprising the unit and integration testing phases and guidelines on how to obtain a high mutation score with respect to mutation testing with a low cost, in terms of the number of mutants generated.

An experiment was conducted to evaluate an inter-procedural test adequacy criterion named Interface Mutation. Program SPACE, developed for the European Space Agency (ESA), was used in this experiment. The development record available for this program was used to find the faults uncovered during its development. Using this information the test process was reproduced starting with a version of SPACE containing several faults and then applying Interface Mutation. Thus we could evaluate the fault revealing effectiveness of Interface Mutation. Results from the experiment suggest that (a) the application of Interface Mutation favors the selection of fault revealing test cases when they exist and (b) Interface Mutation tends to select fault revealing test cases more efficiently than in the case where random selection is used.

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The need for test adequacy criteria is widely recognized. Several criteria have been proposed for the assessment of adequacy of tests at the unit level. However, there remains a lack of criteria for the assessment of the adequacy of tests generated during integration testing. We present a mutation based interprocedural criterion, named Interface Mutation (IM), suitable for use during integration testing. A case study to evaluate the proposed criterion is reported. In the study, the UNIX sort utility was seeded with errors and Interface Mutation evaluated by measuring the cost of its application and its error revealing effectiveness. Alternative IM criteria using different sets of Interface Mutation operators were also evaluated. While comparing the error revealing effectiveness of these Interface Mutation-based test sets with same size randomly generated test sets, we observed that in most cases Interface Mutation based test sets are superior. The results suggest that Interface Mutation offers a viable test adequacy criteria for use at the integration level.

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Many researchers have pursued the establishment of a low-cost, effective testing and validation strategy at the program level as well as at the specification level. Mutation Testing is an error-based approach, originally introduced for program testing, that provides testers a systematic way to evaluate how good a given test set is. Some studies have also investigated its use to generate test sets. In this article, the application of Mutation Testing for validating Estelle specifications is proposed. A mutant operator set for Estelle—one of the crucial points for effectively applying Mutation Testing—is defined, addressing: the validation of the behavior of the modules, the communication among modules and the architecture of the specification. In this scope, these operators can be taken as a fault model. Considering this context, a strategy for validating Estelle-based specification is proposed and exemplified using the Alternating-bit protocol.

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