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Although powerful, mutation is a computationally very expensive testing technique. In fact, its three main stages (mutant generation, mutant execution and result analysis) require many resources to be successfully accomplished. Thus, researchers have made important efforts to reduce its costs. This paper represents an additional effort in this sense. It describes the results of two experiments in which, by means of combining the original set of mutants and therefore obtaining a new set of mutants - each one with two faults - the number of mutants used is reduced to half. Results lead to believe that mutant combination does not decrease the quality of the test suite, whereas it supposes important savings in mutant execution and result analysis.

This article presents two tools to generate test cases, one for Java programs and one for .NET programs, as well as a structured testing process whereby such tools can be used in order to help in process automation. The main innovation in this work is the joint use of diverse techniques and technologies, which have been separately applied to test automation: reflection to extract the class structure; regular expressions to describe test templates and test cases; JUnit and NUnit as test case execution frameworks; mutation and MuJava as test case quality measurers; serialization to deal with the parameters of complex data types; and once more, reflection, to facilitate the test engineer in the task of writing the oracle. Finally, the article presents an experiment carried out to validate the work. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.