Available soon...

The effectiveness of mutation testing depends heavily on the types of faults that the mutation operators are designed to represent. Thus, the quality of the mutation operators is key to mutation testing. Although, mutation operators for object-oriented languages have previously been presented, little research has been done to show the usefulness of the class mutation operators. To assess the usefulness of class mutation operators, we conducted two empirical studies. In the first study, we examine the number and kinds of mutants that are generated for object-oriented programs. In the second study, we investigate the way in which class mutation operators model faults that are not detected by traditional mutation testing. We conducted our studies using a well-known object-oriented system, BCEL.

This paper presents results from empirical studies of object-oriented, class level mutation operators, using the auto- mated analysis and testing tool MuJava. Class mutation operators modify OO programming language features such as inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic binding and encapsulation. This paper presents data from 866 classes in six open-source programs. Several new class-level mutation operators are defined in this paper and an analysis of the number of mutants generated is provided. Techniques for eliminating some equivalent mutants are described and data from an automated tool are provided. One important result is that class-level mutation operators yield far more equivalent mutants than traditional, statement-level, operators. Another is that there are far fewer class-level mutants than statement-level mutants. Together, these data suggest that mutation for inter-class testing can be practically affordable.

Mutation testing is a valuable experimental research technique that has been used in many studies. It has been experimentally compared with other test criteria, and also used to support experimental comparisons of other test criteria, by using mutants as a method to create faults. In effect, mutation is often used as a ``gold standard'' for experimental evaluations of test methods. Although mutation testing is powerful, it is a complicated and computationally expensive testing method. Therefore, automated tool support is indispensable for conducting mutation testing. This demo presents a publicly available mutation system for Java that supports both method-level mutants and class-level mutants. MuJava can be freely downloaded and installed with relative ease under both Unix and Windows. MuJava is offered as a free service to the community and we hope that it will promote the use of mutation analysis for experimental research in software testing.

Several module and class testing techniques have been applied to object-oriented (OO) programs, but researchers have only recently begun developing test criteria that evaluate the use of key OO features such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. Mutation testing is a powerful testing technique for generating software tests and evaluating the quality of software. However, the cost of mutation testing has traditionally been so high that it cannot be applied without full automated tool support. This paper presents a method to reduce the execution cost of mutation testing for OO programs by using two key technologies, mutant schemata generation (MSG) and bytecode translation. This method adapts the existing MSG method for mutants that change the program behaviour and uses bytecode translation for mutants that change the program structure. A key advantage is in performance: only two compilations are required and both the compilation and execution time for each is greatly reduced. A mutation tool based on the MSG/bytecode translation method has been built and used to measure the speedup over the separate compilation approach. Experimental results show that the MSG/bytecode translation method is about five times faster than separate compilation.

Available soon...

Mutation is a powerful but complicated and computationally expensive testing method. Mutation is also a valuable experimental research technique that has been used in many studies. Mutation has been experimentally compared with other test criteria, and also used to support experimental comparisons of other test criteria, by using mutants as a method to create faults. In effect, mutation is often used as a "gold standard" for experimental evaluations of test methods. This paper presents a publicly available mutation system for Java that supports both traditional statement-level mutants and newer inter-class mutants. MUJAVA can be freely downloaded and installed with relative ease under both Unix and Windows. MUJAVA is offered as a free service to the community and we hope that it will promote the use of mutation analysis for experimental research in software testing.

Available soon...