A new approach to automated test data generation in mutation testing

Mutation testing is an effective software testing method, which generates mutants by applying mutation operators to simulate software defects systematically, and then a test suit is constructed to kill these mutants. It will improve the efficiency and effectiveness in mutation testing to generate test data to kill mutants automatically. The existing approaches generate test datum for killing a single mutant. According to the observation that the conditions of killing multiple same-location mutants are of similar, a new approach is proposed in this paper, which combines these same-location mutants conditions, then test datum which may kill more mutants is generated. A prototype is developed, on which experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.EI061025-10343