An experimental mutation system for Java

Abstract

Mutation is a powerful but complicated and computationally expensive testing method. Mutation is also a valuable experimental research technique that has been used in many studies. Mutation has been experimentally compared with other test criteria, and also used to support experimental comparisons of other test criteria, by using mutants as a method to create faults. In effect, mutation is often used as a "gold standard" for experimental evaluations of test methods. This paper presents a publicly available mutation system for Java that supports both traditional statement-level mutants and newer inter-class mutants. MUJAVA can be freely downloaded and installed with relative ease under both Unix and Windows. MUJAVA is offered as a free service to the community and we hope that it will promote the use of mutation analysis for experimental research in software testing.