Mutation operators for object-oriented systems: A survey

Mutation testing is a technique in which all possible faulty versions of a program are generated for mutation analysis and to assess the test suit adequacy. In literature, most research on mutation testing has been focused on traditional programming paradigm. Some of the traditional mutation-operators are incorporated in mutation testing of object oriented systems. Recently class level mutation operators are also defined, which is the main focus of this article with particular consideration of the OO programming (OOP) language JAVA. A number of automated tools have been developed to generate the defective versions of program and to execute them against test suit. Classification, evaluation of the mutation operators against some proposed parameters and identification of some research areas is a result of this survey.