Mutation-based testing of concurrent programs

Mutation-based software testing is a powerful technique for testing software systems. It requires executing many slightly different versions of the same program to evaluate the quality of the test cases used to test the program. Mutation-based testing has been applied to sequential software; however, problems are encountered when it is applied to concurrent programs. These problems are a product of the nondeterminism inherent in the executions of concurrent programs. In this paper, we describe a general approach to testing and debugging concurrent programs, called deterministic execution testing and debugging. We then describe a combination of deterministic execution testing and mutation-based testing, called deterministic execution mutation testing (DEMT), and illustrate the DEMT approach with an example