Ordered mutation testing

Abstract

Mutation Analysis is an established technique for test data generation and source code testing. Developed systems have concentrated on applying some or all of the possible mutant operators (perturbations) to the submitted code. Recent work tackled the scheduling of mutant program execution on vector processors or a Hypercube as a cost reduction scheme. This paper discusses a logical mechanism of impact driven testing in order to acheive full mutation testing with reduced overheads regardless of implementation. Guiding the mutant generation by block impact together with mutant operator heirarchies and a test data coverage scheme enable an efficient tool to be constructed.