Mutation 2020
Sat 24 Oct 2020 Porto, Portugal
co-located with ICST 2020
Sat 24 Oct 2020 14:45 - 15:00 at Arrábida - Session I

Diversity has been proposed as a key criterion to improve testing effectiveness and efficiency. It can be used to optimise large test repositories but also to visualise test maintenance issues and raise practitioners’ awareness about waste in test artefacts and processes. Even though these diversitybased testing techniques aim to exercise diverse behavior in the system under test (SUT), the diversity has mainly been measured on and between artefacts (e.g., inputs, outputs or test scripts). Here, we introduce a family of measures to capture behavioural diversity (b-div) of test cases by comparing their executions and failure outcomes. Using failure information to capture the SUT behaviour has been shown to improve effectiveness of history-based test prioritisation approaches. However, historybased techniques require reliable test execution logs which are often not available or can be difficult to obtain due to flaky tests, scarcity of test executions, etc. To be generally applicable we instead propose to use mutation testing to measure behavioral diversity by running the set of test cases on various mutated versions of the SUT. Concretely, we propose two specific b-div measures (based on accuracy and Matthew’s correlation coefficient, respectively) and compare them with artefact-based diversity (a-div) for prioritising the test suites of 6 different open-source projects. Our results show that our b-div measures outperform a-div and random selection in all of the studied projects. The improvement is substantial with an average increase in average percentage of faults detected (APFD) of between 19% to 31% depending on the size of the subset of prioritised tests.

Sat 24 Oct

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

12:40 - 15:00
12:40
25m
Day opening
Warm Up
Mutation 2020

13:05
10m
Day opening
Welcome
Mutation 2020

13:15
75m
Talk
Keynote
Mutation 2020
Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
14:30
15m
Full-paper
On the impact of timeouts and JVM crashes in Pitest
Mutation 2020
Thomas Laurent Lero & University College Dublin, Fionnuala Wall Lero and University College Dublin, Anthony Ventresque Lero and University College Dublin
Link to publication DOI
14:45
15m
Full-paper
Using mutation testing to measure behavioural test diversity
Mutation 2020
Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Felix Dobslaw Chalmers University of Technology, Robert Feldt Chalmers University of Technology
Link to publication DOI