Test suite reduction for mutation testing based on formal concept analysis

Formal concept analysis (FCA) is a method used for deriving implicit relationships between objects by attributes. Aim at the expensive cost problem in mutation testing caused by the large number of mutants and large number of test cases generated to kill these mutants. This paper proposed a test suite reduce method for mutation testing based on FCA. In order to reduce the number of test cases, a test generation algorithm and three reduction rules were presented to reduce the set of test suite based on concept lattice. Results showed this approach can help to reduce the redundancy of test cases for mutation testing.