DocumentCode :
3085593
Title :
Mutation of Java objects
Author :
Alexander, Roger T. ; Bieman, James M. ; Ghosh, Sudipto ; Ji, Bixia
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO, USA
fYear :
2002
fDate :
2002
Firstpage :
341
Lastpage :
351
Abstract :
Fault insertion based techniques have been used for measuring test adequacy and testability of programs. Mutation analysis inserts faults into a program with the goal of creating mutation-adequate test sets that distinguish the mutant from the original program. Software testability is measured by calculating the probability that a program will fail on the next test input coming from a predefined input distribution, given that the software includes a fault. Inserted faults must represent plausible errors. It is relatively easy to apply standard transformations to mutate scalar values such as integers, floats, and character data, because their semantics are well understood. Mutating objects that are instances of user defined types is more difficult. There is no obvious way to modify such objects in a manner consistent with realistic faults, without writing custom mutation methods for each object class. We propose a new object mutation approach along with a set of mutation operators and support tools for inserting faults into objects that instantiate items from common Java libraries heavily used in commercial software as well as user defined classes. Preliminary evaluation of our technique shows that it should be effective for evaluating real-world software testing suites.
Keywords :
Java; object-oriented programming; program testing; software tools; common Java libraries; fault insertion based techniques; mutation analysis; mutation operators; mutation-adequate test sets; predefined input distribution; probability; real-world software testing suites; support tools; test adequacy; testability; user defined types; Computer science; Genetic mutations; Java; Probability; Software libraries; Software measurement; Software testing; Software tools; System testing; Writing;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Software Reliability Engineering, 2002. ISSRE 2003. Proceedings. 13th International Symposium on
ISSN :
1071-9458
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1763-3
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/ISSRE.2002.1173285
Filename :
1173285
Link To Document :
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