Using conditional mutation to increase the efficiency of mutation analysis

Abstract

Assessing testing strategies and test sets is a crucial part of software testing. Mutation analysis is, among other approaches, a suitable technique for this purpose. However, compared with other methods it is rather time-consuming and applying mutation analysis to large software systems is still problematic. This paper presents a versatile approach, called conditional mutation, which increases the efficiency of mutation analysis. This new method significantly reduces the time overhead for generating and executing the mutants. Results are reported for eight investigated programs up to 373,000 lines of code and 406,000 generated mutants. Furthermore, conditional mutation has been integrated into the Java 6 Standard Edition compiler. Thus, it is widely applicable and not limited to a certain testing tool or framework.