In proceedings of the 7th joint meeting of the european software engineering conference and the acm sigsoft international symposium on foundations of software engineering, 2009, amsterdam, the netherlands, august 2428, 2009. Mutation testing is a type of white box testing that can give you a pretty good idea of the quality of your tests. However, it has been neglected by many testers because of the costly. A good unit test suite typically detects the program mutations and fails automatically.
After making some changes in the software, the program becomes a mutated program and the changes effected in the program are called the mutant, and thus the testing performed after this is called as mutation testing. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades. Mutation score 1 during testing a mutant is considered live if it has not been distinguished. Mutation testing is a structural testing technique, which uses the structure of the code to guide the testing process. It is widely considered the strongest test criterion in terms of finding the most faults and it subsumes a number of other coverage criteria. Apr 16, 2020 beta testing is a formal type of software testing which is carried out by the customer. In software engineering, four main levels of testing are unit testing, integration testing, system testing and acceptance testing. However, due to the fundamental difference between traditional software and deep learningbased software, traditional mutation testing techniques cannot. Mutation testing, system testing and performance testing.
Instead it takes the program and creates many mutants of it by making simple changes to the program. Here, we would be specifically talking about the mutation testing, system testing and the performance testing of software. Mutation testing is typically used to conduct unit tests. Apr 29, 2020 a level of software testing is a process where every unit or component of a software system is tested. Mutation testing or mutation analysis or program mutation is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. Code changed in this way becomes a mutation, and the goal is to make sure that your suite of tests can kill the mutant by having one or more tests fail. And our aim is to determine whether our test suite is able to detect the injected bugs. White box testing in software engineering software engineering tutorials duration. Sep 10, 2017 an intro to mutation testing or why coverage. Is there a modern replacement for a mutation testing tool. The literature on mutation testing has contributed a set of approaches, tools, developments, and empirical results.
In this article, we will be discussing some of the very important software testing terms that are often confused among students. Changes introduced to the software are intended to cause errors in the program. However, popular mutation testing tools use a restrictive set of mutants which do. A mutation testing framework, however, would quickly notice that the following would also pass. Abstractmutation testing is used extensively to support the experimentation of software engineering studies. Its application to realworld projects is possible thanks to modern tools that automate the whole mutation analysis process. If the mutant is not detected by the test suite, is means that the test suite is not adequate. On this mutant we execute the same test cases again. Mutation has been ranked as one the most effective testing techniques in assessing the quality of input values and test cases. These ambiguities might cause failures in the software if not fixed and can easily pass. This is done to determine the effectiveness of the test set in isolating the deviations. In software engineering, mutation testing could be fundamentally categorized into 3 types statement mutation, decision mutation, and value. Bva theory and introduction software engineering lectures duration. In mutation testing, bugs are intentionally inserted into the program and mutants are created.
White box testing implies that the code is inherently visible and known to the tester, or the person writing the mutation tests in this particular case. A multiobjective test data generation approach for. Mutation testing assesses test suite efficacy by inserting small faults into programs and measuring the ability of the test suite to detect them. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. If the mutant fails the test cases then we see that our test. Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be a.
In this way, the operators and mutation score can be used to evaluate and generate a test set, that is a set of spl products to be tested. Definition, test cases example what is regression testing. Statement mutation developer cut and pastes a part of a code of which the outcome may be a removal of some lines. Mutation testing measures the adequacy of the test suite by seeding artificial defects i.
The goal of testing is to make sure that during the course of testing each mutant produces an output different from the output of the original program. Why is mutation testing important in software engineering. Mutation testing is a type of software testing that is performed to design new software tests and also evaluate the quality of already existing software tests. The mutations introduced to source code are designed to imitate common programming errors. Performance testing this test proves how efficient the software is. Pit is a state of the art mutation testing system, providing gold standard test coverage for java and the jvm. Mutation testing is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing. Mutation approaches have been recently applied for feature testing of software product lines spls.
Following are the steps to execute mutation testing mutation analysis. The purpose of mutation testing is to find out efficiency and effectiveness of test cases. And new test suites are added until all the mutants have been detected. A lot of research done in software engineering tries to bring some insights to this problem. Test cases are applied to the original program and also to the mutant program. On test automation an introduction to mutation testing. Efficient and scalable mutation analysis for java, in proceedings of the international symposium on software testing and analysis issta, 2014.
Mutation testing is a type of software testing that is performed to design new software. New tests can be designed to kill additional mutants. A fortran language system for mutationbased software testing, kim n. Suppose you decide to over engineer a solution and add this method to the fakecattrapdoor. Dec 17, 2018 the article states that mutation testing is a type of white box testing which is mainly used for unit testing. Mutation testing, which got its start back in the 1960s, injects faults into your code to see how well a battery of tests can detect the change. Mutation testing does not take a pathbased approach. This extremely oversimplified example would produce a 100% code coverage in terms of executed lines during the testing process. Heather conklin, david kaiser examine the benefits of mutation testing, with realworld examples of what happened with apparently wellcovered code put through the process. Functionality testing tests all functionalities of the software against the requirement.
On a very high level, it is the process of rewriting the source code in small ways in order to remove the redundancies in the source code. Enabling mutation testing for android apps proceedings. I urge you to foster mutation testing as the key index for a. A fortran language system for mutation based software testing, kim n. Mutation testing is related to modification a program in small ways.
It is performed in the real environment before releasing the product to the market for the actual endusers. The primary goal of system testing is to evaluate the systems compliance with the specified needs. In mutation testing we change some syntax in source code and check if test cases are able to find bugs. When software developers encounter surviving mutants, they. Mutation testing is directed to ensure the quality of a software. Learn best practices for reducing software defects with techbeacons guide.
It also helps in estimating or boosting the adequacy of test suites. The whole point of mutation testing is to show if your tests are able to detect. Mutation testing is a method of software testing in which program or source code is deliberately manipulated, followed by suite of testing against the mutated code. Regression testing is defined as a type of software testing to confirm that a recent program or code change has not adversely affected existing features. The article states that mutation testing is a type of white box testing which is mainly used for unit testing.
Software engineering in control flow based and data flow based testing the focus was on which paths to execute during testing. Therefore, mutation testing can be considered as a mainstream line of research. The goal is for the software test to be able to detect all mutated code. Assessing and improving the mutation testing practice of pit. Ieee transactions on software engineering 1 an analysis. In traditional software testing, mutation testing is a wellestablished technique for quality evaluation of test suites, which analyzes to what extent a test suite detects the injected faults. Fraser, are mutants a valid substitute for real faults in software testing.
Mutation testing for android applications by lin deng a dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty of george mason university in partial ful. Mutation testing involves modifying a program in small ways. Thanks for contributing an answer to software engineering stack exchange. Mutation testing is a structural testing approach used to check the efficiency or precision of a testing program. In software engineering, mutation testing could be fundamentally categorized into 3 types statement mutation, decision mutation, and value mutation. This method helps to check the number of defects in an application under test. Faults are introduced into the source code of the program by creating many versions called. Mutation testing is a faultbased testing technique where variations of a software program are subjected to the test dataset. Each mutated version is called a mutant and tests detect and reject mutants by causing the behavior of the original version to differ from the mutant. Number of mutation testing publications per scienti c venue. Ieee transactions on software engineering 1 an analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing yue jia student member, ieee, and mark harman member, ieee abstractmutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades.
All the existing studies about mutation testing showed that mutants can indeed give a good indication for a test suites fault detection capability, as long as the mutant operators are carefully selected and the equivalent mutants are removed. Citeseerx analysis of mutation testing tools in aspect. An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing. But avoid asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. Verification, validation and testing in software engineering. As demonstrated by these figures, the number of scientific publications relying on mutation analysis is continuously increasing, demonstrated in fig. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and survey of mutation testing. Software engineering differences between sanity testing and smoke testing. Mutation testing is a faultbased software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades and the literature generated around the topic has contributed approaches, tools, developments and empirical results for its implementation. Suppose you decide to overengineer a solution and add this method to the fakecattrapdoor.
The idea is to select products, associated to mutation operators that describe possible faults in the feature model fm. This can be accomplished using one or more of the following tests. Incorporating software testing into multiple computer science and software engineering undergraduate courses. The software is compiled as product and then it is tested as a whole. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. Test suites are measured by the percentage of mutants that they kill. In this type of testing strategy, the test cases are designed to kill the mutant. May 17, 2019 data flow and mutation testing software testing.