Mutation Selection: Some Could be Better than All
In previous research, many mutation selection techniques have been proposed to reduce the cost of mutation analysis. After a mutant subset is selected, researchers could obtain a test suite which can detect all mutants in the mutant subset. Then they run all mutants over this test suite, and the detection ratio to all mutants is used to evaluate the effectiveness of mutation selection techniques. The higher the ratio is, the better this selection technique is. Obviously, this measurement has a presumption that the set of all mutants is the best to evaluate test cases. However, there is no clearly evidence to support this presumption. So we conducted an experiment to answer the question whether the set of all mutants is the best to evaluate test cases. In this paper, our experiment results show that a subset of mutants may be more similar to faults than all the mutants. Two evaluation metrics were used to measure the similarity – rank and distance. This finding reveals that it may be more appropriate to use a subset rather than all the mutants at hand to evaluate the fault detection capability of test cases.
Zhiyi Zhang Dongjiang You Zhenyu Chen
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China ;Software Institute, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
国际会议
13th International Conference on Enterprise Information System(第13届企业信息系统国际会议 ICEIS 2011)
北京
英文
1582-1589
2011-06-08（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）