Mutation 2020
Sat 24 Oct 2020 Porto, Portugal
co-located with ICST 2020
Sat 24 Oct 2020 15:30 - 15:45 at Arrábida - Session II

Mutation Testing (MT) is a state-of-the-art technique for assessing test suite effectiveness. The MT principle is to inject variants, known as mutants, into the System Under Test (SUT). Then, the behaviour of the original SUT is compared to that of the mutated SUT when running the same test suite. If no difference in behaviour is observed, the mutant is said to have survived; otherwise, it is said to have been killed. Despite its strengths, the applicability of MT in practice has been limited by its high computational cost. To mitigate this problem, Predictive Mutation Testing (PMT) has been proposed. PMT uses a classification model based on features related to the mutated code and the test suite to predict the execution results of a mutant without actually executing it. In other words, PMT predicts whether a mutant will be killed or will survive. In previous studies, PMT has been evaluated on several projects in two application scenarios, involving cross-project and crossversion learning. The goal of our research is to investigate how well the proposed PMT method, which has been evaluated on Java, can be extended to other programming languages. For that purpose, we first replicated the previous study and then extended the PMT approach to a single C program. We used random forrest classifiers as our supervised learning approach of choice. Our results indicate that PMT is able to predict the execution results of mutants with high accuracy. On the Java projects, we achieved Area Under Curve (AUC) values above 0.90 with a Prediction Error (PE) below 10%. On the C project, we achieved an AUC value above 0.90 with a PE below 1%. In our analyses we also investigated how sensitive the performance of PMT is to the set of selected features. In particular, we wanted to understand whether adding programming language specific features to a language independent core set of features significantly improve the performance of PMT. Our results are an indicator that, overall, PMT has potential to be applied across programming languages and is robust when dealing with imbalanced data.

Sat 24 Oct

Displayed time zone: Lisbon change

15:15 - 16:30
15:15
15m
Full-paper
SiMut: Exploring Program Similarity to Support the Cost Reduction of Mutation Testing
Mutation 2020
Alessandro V. Pizzoleto Federal University of Sao Carlos, Fabiano Ferrari Federal University of São Carlos, Lucas D. Dallilo University of Sao Paulo, Jeff Offutt George Mason University
Link to publication DOI
15:30
15m
Full-paper
Predicting Survived and Killed Mutants
Mutation 2020
Alejandra Duque Torres Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Natia Doliashvili Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Dietmar Pfahl University of Tartu, Rudolf Ramler Software Competence Center Hagenberg
Link to publication DOI
15:45
15m
Full-paper
Fault Types of Adaptive and Context-Aware Systems and Their Relationship with Fault-based Testing Approaches
Mutation 2020
Bento Rafael Siqueira Federal University of São Carlos, Fabiano Ferrari Federal University of São Carlos, Kathiani E. Souza Federal University of São Carlos, Daniel S. M. Santibáñez Federal University of São Carlos, Valter Vieira Camargo Federal University of São Carlos
Link to publication DOI
16:00
15m
Full-paper
MutantDistiller: Using Symbolic Execution for Automatic Detection of Equivalent Mutants and Generation of Mutant Killing Tests
Mutation 2020
Michael Baer , Norbert Oster , Michael Philippsen Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
Link to publication DOI
16:15
15m
Full-paper
An Approach to Identifying Minimal and Equivalent Mutants Based on Source Code Structure
Mutation 2020
Claudinei Brito Junior Universidade de São Paulo, Vinicius Durelli Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei, Rafael S. Durelli Federal University of Lavras Lavras, Simone do Rocio Senger de Souza University of São Paulo - USP, Auri Vincenzi Federal University of São Carlos, Marcio Eduardo Delamaro Universidade de São Paulo
Link to publication DOI