Designing a Tool for Mutation Testing

Abstract

Mutation testing takes a different approach to testing by asking questions about the efficacy of test cases. It is a fault-based technique that measures the effectiveness of test suites for fault localization, base on seeded faults. The fault detection effectiveness of a test suite is defined as the percentage of faults that can be detected by that test suite. A mutation is a change made to the source code by a mutation testing tool. Faults are introduced into the program by creating a collection of faulty versions, called mutants. These mutants are created from the original program by applying mutation operators which describe syntactic changes to the original code. The test suite is then used to execute these mutants and to measure how well it is able to find faults. A test case that distinguishes (returning a different result) the program from one or more of its mutants is considered to be effective in finding faults. A mutation score is a quantitative measurement of the quality of the test suite. This report describes an automated mutation testing tool for Java programs. It describes the framework of 6 the proposed tool and how the various components of the tool are interconnected to each other. Also it provides the various mutation operators present in the tool.