Title
Assessing and Improving the Mutation Testing Practice of PIT.
Abstract
Mutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. Its application to real-world projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. 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. This can be problematic since the effectiveness of mutation depends on its mutants. We therefore examine how effective are the mutants of a popular mutation testing tool, named PIT, compared to comprehensive ones, as drawn from the literature and personal experience. We show that comprehensive mutants are harder to kill and encode faults not captured by the mutants of PIT for a range of 11% to 62% of the Java classes of the considered projects.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2016
CoRR
software engineering,mutation testing,software testing
Field
DocType
Volume
Computer science,Mutation testing,Test case,Mutant,Reliability engineering,Mutation,Software testing
Journal
abs/1601.02351
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.46
47
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thomas Laurent1324.44
Anthony Ventresque210817.08
Mike Papadakis3111452.77
Christopher Henard438310.88
Yves Le Traon53922190.39