Modeling mutation on a vector processor

  • Authors:
  • A. P. Mathur;E. W. Krauser

  • Affiliations:
  • Purdue Univ., W. Lafayette, Indiana;Purdue Univ., W. Lafayette, Indiana

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '88 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

Mutation analysis is a software testing methodology designed to substantiate the correctness of a program &PHgr;. The mutation approach is to induce syntactically correct changes in &PHgr;, thereby creating a set of mutant programs. The goal of a tester is to construct a set of test data T that distinguishes the output of &PHgr;(T) from that of all mutant programs. Test data sensitive enough to distinguish al1 mutant programs is deemed adequate to infer the probable correctness of &PHgr;.We propose an algorithm designed to exploit the architecture of a vector processor like the Cyber 205 or Cray X/MP. The algorithm manages the simultaneous execution of multiple mutant FORTRAN 77 programs. This is accomplished by viewing the execution of these mutants as a sequence of vector instructions. The algorithm promises potential to greatly increase the performance of a mutation based testing system, as well as points towards a general method of simultaneous program execution against multiple data sets.