Assessing and improving the mutation testing practice of pit. And our aim is to determine whether our test suite is able to detect the injected bugs. Test cases are applied to the original program and also to the mutant program. Apr 16, 2020 beta testing is a formal type of software testing which is carried out by the customer. If the mutant fails the test cases then we see that our test. Pit is a state of the art mutation testing system, providing gold standard test coverage for java and the jvm. On test automation an introduction to mutation testing. The primary goal of system testing is to evaluate the systems compliance with the specified needs. May 17, 2019 data flow and mutation testing software testing. Number of mutation testing publications per scienti c venue.
Mutation testing is a structural testing approach used to check the efficiency or precision of a testing program. If the mutant is not detected by the test suite, is means that the test suite is not adequate. 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. Its application to realworld projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. Abstractmutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. The idea is to select products, associated to mutation operators that describe possible faults in the feature model fm. 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. Enabling mutation testing for android apps proceedings. 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. Mutation testing or mutation analysis or program mutation is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. The purpose of mutation testing is to find out efficiency and effectiveness of test cases.
This extremely oversimplified example would produce a 100% code coverage in terms of executed lines during the testing process. In software engineering, four main levels of testing are unit testing, integration testing, system testing and acceptance testing. Performance testing this test proves how efficient the software is. Learn best practices for reducing software defects with techbeacons guide. It is widely considered the strongest test criterion in terms of finding the most faults and it subsumes a number of other coverage criteria.
Mutation approaches have been recently applied for feature testing of software product lines spls. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing. Suppose you decide to overengineer a solution and add this method to the fakecattrapdoor. 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. An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing.
When software developers encounter surviving mutants, they. Efficient and scalable mutation analysis for java, in proceedings of the international symposium on software testing and analysis issta, 2014. Dec 17, 2018 the article states that mutation testing is a type of white box testing which is mainly used for unit testing. Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be a. In software engineering, mutation testing could be fundamentally categorized into 3 types statement mutation, decision mutation, and value. 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.
White box testing in software engineering software engineering tutorials duration. Mutation testing does not take a pathbased approach. Mutation testing involves modifying a program in small ways. These ambiguities might cause failures in the software if not fixed and can easily pass through testing phase undetected. Thanks for contributing an answer to software engineering stack exchange. In this article, we will be discussing some of the very important software testing terms that are often confused among students. In proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the european software engineering conference and the acm sigsoft international symposium on foundations of software engineering, 2009, amsterdam, the netherlands, august 2428, 2009. New tests can be designed to kill additional mutants. But avoid asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
However, due to the fundamental difference between traditional software and deep learningbased software, traditional mutation testing techniques cannot. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and survey of mutation testing. Therefore, mutation testing can be considered as a mainstream line of research. Verification, validation and testing in software engineering. Functionality testing tests all functionalities of the software against the requirement. In traditional software testing, mutation testing is a wellestablished technique for quality evaluation of test suites, which analyzes to what extent a test suite detects the injected faults. White box testing implies that the code is inherently visible and known to the tester, or the person writing the mutation tests in this particular case. A fortran language system for mutationbased software testing, kim n. Regression testing is defined as a type of software testing to confirm that a recent program or code change has not adversely affected existing features. The whole point of mutation testing is to show if your tests are able to detect. Changes introduced to the software are intended to cause errors in the program. Software engineering differences between sanity testing and smoke testing. Here, we would be specifically talking about the mutation testing, system testing and the performance testing of software.
Mutation testing is a faultbased testing technique where variations of a software program are subjected to the test dataset. Fraser, are mutants a valid substitute for real faults in software testing. Mutation testing is related to modification a program in small ways. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. 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. 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. Following are the steps to execute mutation testing mutation analysis.
On this mutant we execute the same test cases again. Faults are introduced into the source code of the program by creating many versions called. This is done to determine the effectiveness of the test set in isolating the deviations. Beta testing is carried out to ensure that there are no major failures in the software or product and it satisfies the business requirements from an. The literature on mutation testing has contributed a set of approaches, tools, developments, and empirical results. The goal of testing is to make sure that during the course of testing each mutant produces an output different from the output of the original program. Instead it takes the program and creates many mutants of it by making simple changes to the program. A multiobjective test data generation approach for. A fortran language system for mutation based software testing, kim n. Bva theory and introduction software engineering lectures duration.
Mutation testing measures the adequacy of the test suite by seeding artificial defects i. In this type of testing strategy, the test cases are designed to kill the mutant. Citeseerx analysis of mutation testing tools in aspect. In software engineering, mutation testing could be fundamentally categorized into 3 types statement mutation, decision mutation, and value mutation.
Mutation testing is a structural testing technique, which uses the structure of the code to guide the testing process. It focuses to help the tester develop effective tests or locate weaknesses in the test data used for the program. These ambiguities might cause failures in the software if not fixed and can easily pass. Ieee transactions on software engineering 1 an analysis. Is there a modern replacement for a mutation testing tool. 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. Mutation testing is a type of software testing that is performed to design new software. Mutation testing is a type of white box testing that can give you a pretty good idea of the quality of your tests. A lot of research done in software engineering tries to bring some insights to this problem. Why is mutation testing important in software engineering. Mutation score 1 during testing a mutant is considered live if it has not been distinguished.
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. The goal is for the software test to be able to detect all mutated code. However, popular mutation testing tools use a restrictive set of mutants which do. And new test suites are added until all the mutants have been detected.
As demonstrated by these figures, the number of scientific publications relying on mutation analysis is continuously increasing, demonstrated in fig. I urge you to foster mutation testing as the key index for a. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades. Mutation testing is typically used to conduct unit tests. Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be a removal of some lines. Mutation testing for android applications by lin deng a dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty of george mason university in partial ful. Mutation testing is the process of iterating through each line of. In mutation testing we change some syntax in source code and check if test cases are able to find bugs. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. It also helps in estimating or boosting the adequacy of test suites. It is performed in the real environment before releasing the product to the market for the actual endusers. Incorporating software testing into multiple computer science and software engineering undergraduate courses. 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.
Suppose you decide to over engineer a solution and add this method to the fakecattrapdoor. This can be accomplished using one or more of the following tests. Mutation testing is directed to ensure the quality of a software. However, it has been neglected by many testers because of the costly. The article states that mutation testing is a type of white box testing which is mainly used for unit testing. Mutation has been ranked as one the most effective testing techniques in assessing the quality of input values and test cases. Test suites are measured by the percentage of mutants that they kill. In mutation testing, bugs are intentionally inserted into the program and mutants are created. Apr 29, 2020 a level of software testing is a process where every unit or component of a software system is tested. Heather conklin, david kaiser examine the benefits of mutation testing, with realworld examples of what happened with apparently wellcovered code put through the process. 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. This method helps to check the number of defects in an application under test. Definition, test cases example what is regression testing. A mutation testing framework, however, would quickly notice that the following would also pass.
Mutation testing, system testing and performance testing. Mutation testing assesses test suite efficacy by inserting small faults into programs and measuring the ability of the test suite to detect them. Software engineering in control flow based and data flow based testing the focus was on which paths to execute during testing. The mutations introduced to source code are designed to imitate common programming errors.
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