Effectiveness of Mutation Testing Techniques: Reducing Mutation Cost

Abstract: The field of mutation testing has been neglected by industry for a long time because of its high cost. The rising research in this field has resulted in the development of several approaches that aim to reduce the cost of testing and to assess the quality of mutants ’ generation and destruction. Some approaches suggest decreasing the number of operators, while others intend to reduce the execution time. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of three approaches that reduce the mutation testing cost: class-level, method-level, 10-selective and all operators approach. The experimental part of this research was based on testing seven Java programs using MuClipse tool. The analysis of the resulting findings has proved that the cost of mutation testing can be minimized by selecting a subset of the mutation operators and by adopting the class-level mutation operators for fault detection in java programs