GPCE 2017
Mon 23 - Tue 24 October 2017 Vancouver, Canada
co-located with SPLASH 2017
Tue 24 Oct 2017 13:55 - 14:20 at Regency A - Analysis & Testing Chair(s): Jaakko Järvi

Mutation testing is a program-transformation technique that injects artificial bugs to check whether the existing test suite can detect them. However, the costs of using mutation testing are usually high, hindering its use in industry. Useless mutants (equivalent and duplicated) contribute to increase costs. Previous research has focused mainly on detecting useless mutants only after they are generated and compiled. In this paper, we introduce a strategy to help developers with deriving rules to avoid the generation of useless mutants. To use our strategy, we pass as input a set of programs. For each program, we also need a passing test suite and a set of mutants. As output, our strategy yields a set of useless mutants candidates. After manually confirming that the mutants classified by our strategy as "useless" are indeed useless, we derive rules that can avoid their generation and thus decrease costs. To the best of our knowledge, we introduce 37 new rules that can avoid useless mutants right before their generation. We then implement a subset of these rules in the MUJAVA mutation testing tool. Since our rules have been derived based on artificial and small Java programs, we take our MUJAVA version embedded with our rules and execute it in industrial-scale projects. Our rules reduced the number of mutants by almost 13% on average. Our results are promising because (i) we avoid useless mutants generation; (ii) our strategy can help with identifying more rules in case we set it to use more complex Java programs; and (iii) our MUJAVA version has only a subset of the rules we derived.

http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N47205
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Tue 24 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

13:30 - 15:00
Analysis & TestingGPCE 2017 at Regency A
Chair(s): Jaakko Järvi University of Bergen
13:30
25m
Talk
Four Languages and Lots of Macros: Analyzing Autotools Build Systems
GPCE 2017
Jafar M. Al-Kofahi Iowa State University, USA, Suresh Kothari Iowa State University, USA, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University, USA
DOI Authorizer link
13:55
25m
Talk
Avoiding Useless Mutants
GPCE 2017
Leonardo Fernandes Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, Márcio Ribeiro Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, Luiz Carvalho Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, Rohit Gheyi Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, Melina Mongiovi Federal University of Campina Grande, Brazil, Andre Santos , Ana Cavalcanti University of York, UK, Fabiano Ferrari Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, José Carlos Maldonado University of São Paulo, Brazil
DOI Authorizer link
14:20
25m
Talk
Silverchain: A Fluent API Generator
GPCE 2017
Tomoki Nakamaru University of Tokyo, Japan, Kazuhiro Ichikawa University of Tokyo, Japan, Tetsuro Yamazaki University of Tokyo, Japan, Shigeru Chiba University of Tokyo, Japan
DOI Authorizer link
14:45
15m
Talk
Parser Generation by Example for Legacy Pattern LanguagesShort paper
GPCE 2017
Vadim Zaytsev Raincode Labs, Belgium
DOI Authorizer link