This is an archive of the old software engineering chair at Saarland University. It is no longer up-to-date.

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.

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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",
}

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