Calibrated Mutation Testing
- Mutation 2011
by
Jaechang Nam, David Schuler, Andreas Zeller
Mutation '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis, March 2011.
Abstract
During mutation testing, artificial defects are inserted into a program, in order to measure the quality of a test suite and to provide means for improvement. These defects are generated using predefined mutation operators - inspired by faults that programmers tend to make. As the type of faults varies between different programmers and projects, mutation testing might be improved by learning from past defects: Does a sample of mutations similar to past defects help to develop better tests than a randomly chosen sample of mutations? In this paper, we present the first approach that uses software repository mining techniques to calibrate mutation testing to the defect history of a project. Furthermore, we provide an implementation and evaluation of calibrated mutation testing for the JAXEN project. However, first results indicate that calibrated mutation testing cannot outperform random selection strategies.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{nam-mutation-2011, title = "Calibrated Mutation Testing", author = "Jaechang Nam and David Schuler and Andreas Zeller", year = "2011", month = mar, booktitle = "Mutation '11: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis", location = "Berlin, Germany", }