Higher Order Mutation Testing

Personnel

Faculty:
Sudipto Ghosh, Email: ghosh .At. cs.colostate.edu
L. Darrell Whitley Email: whitley .At. cs.colostate.edu

Current Students: Elmahdi Farag Omar (Ph.D.)

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Description

Reducing the number of faults in software has broad significance both in terms of the financial cost of creating and maintaining any software system, and in terms of increasing reliability in safety critical domains such as medicine devices or transportation. The goal of our research is to develop new testing methods that automatically find more complex faults in software. We proposed to do this by 1) automating new Higher Order Mutation testing methods, and 2) automating the generation of new test cases to find more complex faults in software.

Given a set of First Order Mutants (FOMs) and a test set that kills them, our goal is to make the set of FOMs and the corresponding test set more valuable by using the FOMs and the test set to automatically generate better test cases. We will automatically generate Higher Order Mutants that are not killed by the existing test set, and we will automatically generate a more advanced test set from the initial test set that kills the Higher Order Mutants. By leveraging the FOMs and the initial test set in this way, we increase the return on investment for constructing the initial set of FOMs and the corresponding test set. The user only needs to think about First Order Mutation testing; the proposed methods will 1) automatically carry out Higher Order Mutation testing and 2) automatically generate a more sophisticated test set capable of finding complex subtle interacting faults.

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Publications

Journal

1. "On Generating Mutants for AspectJ Programs," F. Wedyan and S. Ghosh, Information and Software Technology 54 (2012), pp 900-914.

Conference

1. "Comparing Search Techniques for Finding Subtle Higher Order Mutants", E. Omar, S. Ghosh and D. Whitley, Accepted to Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 12-16, 2014.

2. "HOMAJ: A Tool for Higher Order Mutation Testing in AspectJ and Java", Elmahdi Omar, Sudipto Ghosh and Darrell Whitley , 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation Workshop on Mutation, Cleveland, OH, March 31 - April 4, 2014.

3. "Constructing Subtle Higher Order Mutants for Java and AspectJ Programs", E. Omar, S. Ghosh and D. Whitley, Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (to appear), Pasadena, CA, November 4-7, 2013.

4. "An Exploratory Study of Higher Order Mutation Testing in Aspect-oriented Programming", Elmahdi Omar and Sudipto Ghosh, Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE'2012), Dallas, USA November 27-30, 2012.