Goal-Oriented Mutation Testing with Focal Methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces a goal-oriented mutation testing approach that uses focal methods to significantly reduce computation time while maintaining high fault detection effectiveness, validated on Apache Ant.

Contribution

It proposes a method to focus mutation testing on focal methods, enabling faster testing without compromising quality, a novel approach in mutation testing.

Findings

Achieved 573.5x speed-up for mutants in focal methods

Maintained 80% quality score in mutation testing

Validated on Apache Ant project

Abstract

Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for each and every injected mutant. In this paper we explore fine-grained traceability links at method level (named focal methods), to reduce the execution time of mutation testing and to verify the quality of the test cases for each individual method, instead of the usually verified overall test suite quality. Validation of our approach on the open source Apache Ant project shows a speed-up of 573.5x for the mutants located in focal methods with a quality score of 80%.