Mutant Density: A Measure of Fault-Sensitive Complexity

TL;DR

Mutant density is a novel complexity metric that uses mutation testing to quantify fault-sensitive complexity in software code, providing insights into fault-proneness beyond traditional metrics.

Contribution

This paper introduces mutant density, a new metric based on mutation testing, to better assess fault-proneness in software code complexity analysis.

Findings

Mutant density correlates with fault-proneness in software components.

The metric provides a new perspective on code complexity related to fault sensitivity.

Application to real-world projects demonstrates its practical usefulness.

Abstract

Software code complexity is a well-studied property to determine software component health. However, the existing code complexity metrics do not directly take into account the fault-proneness aspect of the code. We propose a metric called mutant density where we use mutation as a method to introduce artificial faults in code, and count the number of possible mutations per line. We show how this metric can be used to perform helpful analysis of real-life software projects.