Mutation testing in software engineering

Mutation testing, which got its start back in the 1960s, injects faults into your code to see how well a battery of tests can detect the change. If you stay tuned, in the next article ill delve deeper into the mutation testing, which is the final frontier when it comes to ensuring the highest possible quality of precision engineering in software. Mutation testing assesses test suite efficacy by inserting small faults into programs and measuring the ability of the test suite to detect them. Is there a modern replacement for a mutation testing tool like jester for java. Instead it takes the program and creates many mutants of it by making simple changes to the program. Mutation testing involves modifying a program in small ways. Mutation testing advantages and disadvantages of mutation. Each mutated version is called a mutant and tests detect and reject mutants by causing the behavior of the original version to differ from the mutant. The concept of mutation testing has also been widely used in other software engineering studies, e. Release software faster download enter mutation testing.

It brings a whole new kind of errors to the developers attention. Mutation testing, software testing, survey, seeded faults 1. Learn an interesting testing technique called mutation testing. Mutation testing is typically used to conduct unit tests. A multiobjective test data generation approach for. Is there a modern replacement for a mutation testing tool. Mutation testing is related to modification a program in small ways. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing. When software developers encounter surviving mutants, they. So i have covered some common types of software testing which are mostly used in the testing life cycle. Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be. Software engineering in practice track, may 27june 3.

Schweiggert, using nonredundant mutation operators and test suite prioritization to achieve efficient and scalable mutation analysis, in proceedings of the international symposium on software reliability engineering issre, 2012. The motivation is predict where qa should spend more time testinglooking for bugs. Following benefits are experienced, if mutation testing is adopted. Mutation testing is a structural testing method, i. The feature model fm is a fundamental artifact of the software product line spl engineering, used to represent commonalities and variabilities, and also to derive products for testing. A lot of research done in software engineering tries to bring some insights to this problem. White box testing in software engineering software. On its own, testdriven development is not enough for delivering lean code that. It also helps in estimating or boosting the adequacy of test suites. Test cases are applied to the original program and also to the mutant program.

Experimental evaluation of redundancy in android mutation. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. Mutation testing is a powerful technique for evaluating the quality of test suite which plays a key role in ensuring software quality. Why is mutation testing important in software engineering. An extended overview of the mothra software testing environment, rich demillo, dany guindi, kim king, mike m.

Mutation testing is a structural testing technique, which uses the structure of the code to guide the testing process. An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing. Software testing comprises of validation and verification. I urge you to foster mutation testing as the key index for a. Jul 26, 2016 mutation approaches have been recently applied for feature testing of software product lines spls. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and survey of mutation testing. The mutations introduced to source code are designed to imitate common programming errors. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades and the literature generated around the topic has contributed approaches, tools, developments and empirical results for its implementation.

This method helps to check the number of defects in an application under test. Mutation testing measures the adequacy of the test suite by seeding artificial defects i. A fortran language system for mutation based software testing, kim n. Mutation testing or mutation analysis or program mutation is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. Dec 17, 2018 mutation testing finds any instances where a test should be failing but it is not. Mutations examples mutation testing tools stuart anderson mutation testing c 2011. For todays blog post i wanted to cover mutation testing.

A good unit test suite typically detects the program mutations and fails automatically. Introduction to pervasive computing software development life cycle sdlc. In this way, the operators and mutation score can be used to evaluate and generate a test set, that is a set of spl products to be tested. All the existing studies about mutation testing showed that mutants can indeed give a good indication for a test suites fault detection capability, as long as the mutant operators are carefully selected and the equivalent mutants are removed.

Mutation testing, system testing and performance testing. The literature on mutation testing has contributed a. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. On test automation an introduction to mutation testing. In this type of testing strategy, the test cases are designed to kill the mutant. Assessing and improving the mutation testing practice of pit. An extensive study on crossproject predictive mutation testing. Mutation testing is a faultbased testing technique where variations of a software program are subjected to the test dataset. Testing is conducted at the phase level in software development life cycle or at module level in program code. As far as im aware mutation testing remains the best automated process for measuring the quality of your test suite. Test coverage is considered as an important factor in software testing. I have been made aware of mutation testing only recently, but i have discovered its a very powerful and interesting technique for. Efficient and scalable mutation analysis for java, in proceedings of the international symposium on software testing and analysis issta, 2014.

So mutation testing is defined as using mutation analysis to design new software tests or to evaluate existing software tests. Mutation testing is a method of software testing in which program or source code is deliberately manipulated, followed by suite of testing against the mutated code. Code changed in this way becomes a mutation, and the goal is to make sure that your suite of tests can kill the mutant by having one or more tests fail. Suppose you decide to overengineer a solution and add this method to the fakecattrapdoor. Fraser, are mutants a valid substitute for real faults in software testing. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades and the literature generated around the topic has contributed approaches, tools, developments and. Citeseerx analysis of mutation testing tools in aspect. However, due to the fundamental difference between traditional software and deep learningbased software, traditional mutation testing techniques cannot be directly applied to dl systems. Following are the steps to execute mutation testing mutation analysis. These ambiguities might cause failures in the software if not fixed and can easily pass through testing phase undetected. In this paper, we propose a mutation testing framework specialized for dl systems to measure the quality of test data. Mutation testing is a type of software testing that is performed to design new software tests and also evaluate the quality of already existing software tests. In software engineering, mutation testing could be fundamentally categorized into 3 types statement mutation, decision mutation, and value mutation. Testing and debugging general terms algorithms, experimentation keywords regression mutation testing, mutation testing, regression test.

Thus, giving the reader a minihandbookstyle roadmap for the application of mutation testing as experimental methodology. Practice qualitydriven development with best practices from qa practitioners in. A fortran language system for mutationbased software testing, kim n. Mutation approaches have been recently applied for feature testing of software product lines spls. Mutation testing for android applications by lin deng a dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty of george mason university in partial ful. Nov 15, 2015 why mutation testing need to be performed. If the mutant is not detected by the test suite, is means that the test suite is not adequate. The abovementioned software testing types are just a part of testing.

Mutation testing is a type of software testing that is performed to design new. Mutation testing is a kind of testing in which, the application is tested for the code that was modified after fixing a particular bugdefect. Ieee transactions on software engineering 1 an analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing yue jia student member, ieee, and mark harman member, ieee abstractmutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades. Enabling mutation testing for android apps proceedings of. Mutation testing is a faultbased testing technique where variations of a software program are.

Our prior research designed and implemented android mutation testing technique, and then used experiments to assess its strength. Mutation testing does not take a pathbased approach. In 2016 ieee international conference on software testing, verification and validation, icst 2016, chicago, il, usa, april 1115, 2016. Learn best practices for reducing software defects with techbeacons guide. Mutation testing is a structural testing approach used to check the efficiency or precision of a testing program. Therefore, mutation testing can be considered as a mainstream line of research. Software defect prediction sdp is the line of research that concerned with building prediction models, which leverage software metrics to predict defectprone areas of a software. In control flow based and data flow based testing the focus was on which paths to execute during testing. Heather conklin, david kaiser examine the benefits of mutation testing, with realworld examples of what happened with apparently wellcovered code put through the process. Verification, validation and testing in software engineering. In other words the mutation testing criterion does not say that the set of test cases must be such that certain paths are executed instead it requires the set of test cases to be such that they can distinguish between the original program and its mutants. Nov 08, 2016 in mutation testing, bugs are intentionally inserted into the program and mutants are created. Mutation testing comes under the white box testing and is basically done while performing the unit tests of a particular module of an application. And our aim is to determine whether our test suite is able to detect the injected bugs.

May 17, 2019 58 videos play all software engineering lectures easy engineering classes how to grill a steak by master chef robert del grande duration. A multiobjective test data generation approach for mutation. Here, we would be specifically talking about the mutation testing, system testing and the performance testing of software. Mutation testing of software using a mimd computer, jeff offutt, roy pargas, scott fichter, and p. An extensive study on crossproject predictive mutation. The number of possible mutations to attain full coverage is not realistic to attain without automation. Software testing is evaluation of the software against requirements gathered from users and system specifications. It focuses to help the tester develop effective tests or locate weaknesses in the test data used for the program. In this article, we will be discussing some of the very important software testing terms that are often confused among students. Mutation testing, which got its start back in the 1960s, injects faults into your code. And new test suites are added until all the mutants have been detected. Faults are introduced into the source code of the program by creating many versions called. Introduction how can we generate test cases that reveal faults.

Software product line testing based on feature model mutation. Its application to realworld projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. Mutation testing is the type of software testing which is performed by changing or mutating the piece of code in order to checkverify that the test cases are capable enough to find the errorsdefects. As demonstrated by these figures, the number of scientific publications relying on mutation analysis is continuously increasing, demonstrated in fig. However, popular mutation testing tools use a restrictive set of mutants which do not conform to the community standards as supported by the mutation testing literature. On test automation an introduction to mutation testing and pit. Thus, mutation analysis and testing can be applied to design models, specifications, databases, tests, xml, and other types of software artifacts, although program mutation is the most common. Subsumption alluses scores using mutation adequate test sets are, in general, higher than the mutation scores using alluses adequate test sets. In mutation testing, bugs are intentionally inserted into the program and mutants are created. Automatically discovering, reporting and reproducing android application crashes. It is widely considered the strongest test criterion in terms of finding the most faults and it subsumes a number of other coverage criteria. Fifteenth international conference on software engineering, pages 100107, baltimore, maryland, may 1993. The literature on mutation testing has contributed a set of approaches, tools, developments, and empirical results. On a very high level, it is the process of rewriting the source code in small ways in order to remove the redundancies in the source code these ambiguities might cause failures in.

Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be a removal of some lines. Mutation testing is a method of software testing in which program or source code is deliberately manipulated, followed by suite of testing against the mutated. Mutation testing is the process of iterating through each line of. This blog post will cover the basics of the concept of mutation testing. Eric wong, the university of texas at dallas 44 empirical study. Sdlc difference between good design and bad design in software engineering risk. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades. This paper conducts a comparative study of four different mutation testing techniques classlevel operators, methodlevel operators, all operators, and random sampling. Mutation testing in software development tutorial testingbrain. Future trends in software engineering research for mobile apps. The goal is for the software test to be able to detect all mutated code.

At this point i get lost, for what i know the infection condition in mutation testing appears when there is a change in the state of a program. Enabling mutation testing for android apps proceedings. Various mutation operators that define transformations of the program were defined over time. After making some changes in the software, the program becomes a mutated program and the changes effected in the program are called the mutant, and thus the testing performed after this is called as mutation testing. Ieee transactions on software engineering 1 an analysis and.