An intuitive approach to determine test adequacy in safety-critical software
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Mutation at the multi-class and system levels
Science of Computer Programming
Using regular grammars for event-based testing
CIAA'13 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Implementation and Application of Automata
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If a mutation is not killed by a test suite, this usuallymeans that the test suite is not adequate. However, itmay also be that the mutant keeps the program’s seman-tics unchanged—and thus cannot be detected by any test.We found such equivalent mutants to be surprisingly com-mon: In an experiment on the JAXEN XPATH query engine,8/20 = 40% of all mutations turned out to be equivalent.Worse, checking the equivalency took us 15 minutes for asingle mutation. Equivalent mutants thus make it impossi-ble to automatically assess test suites by means of mutationtesting. To identify equivalent mutants, we are currently investi-gating the impact of a mutation on the execution: the morea mutation alters the execution, the higher the chance of itbeing non-equivalent. First experiments assessing the im-pact on code coverage are promising.