Mutation 2020

Mutation is widely acknowledged as one of the most important techniques to assess the fault-revealing ability of tests. In recent years, mutation has gained popularity both in academia and research, with several companies and research projects attempting to incorporate mutation to the development life cycle. Mutation analysis has traditionally targeted the source code but has also been successfully applied to various artefacts at different levels of abstraction. Examples of such artefacts include: database schemas, finite state machines, various model notations, security policies, software product lines, etc. Mutation has also been employed to solve various research problems including the Test Oracle Problem, Fault Localisation and Debugging, Defect Prediction, etc. To this day, the mutation field continues to expand with an increasing trend of high quality publications.

Mutation 2020 is the 15th in the series of international workshops focusing on mutation analysis. The workshop will be co-located with the 13th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST 2020). Accepted papers will be published as part of the ICST proceedings.

The Mutation workshop aims to be the premier forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss recent advances in the area and propose new research directions. We invite submissions of both full-length and short-length research papers and especially encourage the submission of industry practice papers.

All information about this workshop can be found at the workshop’s official website: https://mutation-workshop.github.io/2020/

Accepted Papers

Call for Submissions

Mutation is widely acknowledged as one of the most important techniques to assess the quality of tests. In recent years, mutation has gained popularity both in academia and research, with several companies and research projects attempting to incorporate mutation to the development life cycle. Mutation analysis has traditionally targeted the source code but has also been successfully applied to various artefacts at different levels of abstraction. Examples of such artefacts include: database schemas, finite state machines, various model notations, security policies, software product lines, etc. Mutation has also been employed to solve various research problems including the Test Oracle Problem, Fault Localisation and Debugging, Defect Prediction, etc. To this day, the mutation field continues to expand with an increasing trend of high quality publications. The Mutation workshop aims to be the premier forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss recent advances in the area and propose new research directions. We invite submissions of both full-length and short-length research papers and especially encourage the submission of industry practice papers.

Topics of interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mutation-based test adequacy criteria (theoretical analyses and practical applications).
• Mutation-based test data generation.
• Higher order mutation testing.
• Novel mutation testing paradigms and applications.
• Novel solutions to mutation’s problems.
• Empirical studies using and/or evaluating mutation.
• Theoretical analysis of mutation testing.
• Mutation testing tools.
• Industrial experience and application of mutation testing.
• Mutation for mobile, internet, and cloud-based systems (QoS, power consumption, etc).
• Mutation for non-functional properties, including security, reliability, performance, etc.
• Mutation for artificial intelligence (e.g., data mutation, model mutation, mutation-based test data generation, etc.)

Types of submission

Three types of papers can be submitted to the workshop:

• Full papers (10 pages): Research, case studies.
• Short papers (6 pages): Research in progress, tools.
• Industrial papers (6 pages): Applications and lessons learned in industry.
• Poster papers (2 pages): Research in progress, tools, problem descriptions, new ideas.

Each paper must conform to the two columns IEEE conference publication format and must be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. Submissions will be evaluated according to the relevance and originality of the work and to their ability to generate discussions between the participants of the workshop. Three reviewers will review each paper and all the accepted papers will be published as part of the ICST proceedings.

Special issue on mutation analysis and its industrial applications

We encourage authors of accepted papers to submit an extended version of their paper to a special issue on Mutation Analysis and its Industrial Applications published by the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR).