Isolating first order equivalent mutants via second order mutation

Abstract—In this paper, a technique named I-EQM, able to dynamically isolate first order equivalent mutants, is proposed. I-EQM works by employing a novel dynamic execution scheme that integrates both first and second order mutation. The proposed approach combines the “impact ” on the program execution of the first order mutants with the “impact ” on the output of second order ones, to isolate likely to be first order equivalent mutants. Experimental results on a benchmark set of manually classified mutants, selected from real word programs, reveals that I-EQM achieves to classify equivalent mutants with a 71 % and 82 % classification precision and recall respectively. These results improve the previously proposed approaches by selecting (retrieving) a considerably higher number of killable mutants with only a limited loss on the classification precision