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Quantitative Analysis of Mutant Equivalence

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Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1250))

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Abstract

Program mutation is the process of generating syntactic variations of a base program and analyzing them by comparison with the base; this process is meaningful only to the extent that the mutants are semantically distinct from the base program, but that is not always the case. Two programs may be syntactically distinct yet semantically equivalent. The problem of identifying and weeding out equivalent mutants has eluded researchers for a long time. In this chapter we argue that researchers ought to abandon the overly ambitious goal of determining whether a program and its mutant are equivalent, and focus instead on the more modest, but sufficient, goal of estimating the number of equivalent mutants that a program is prone to generate.

This research is partially supported by NSF under grant DGE 1565478.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by a grant from NSF, number DGE1565478.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SUNY, Farmingdale, NY, USA

    Amani Ayad

  2. University of Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia

    Imen Marsit & Mohamed Nazih Omri

  3. SUST, Khartoum, Sudan

    Sara Tawfig

  4. NJIT, Newark, NJ, USA

    Ji Meng Loh & Ali Mili

Authors
  1. Amani Ayad
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  2. Imen Marsit
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  4. Ji Meng Loh
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  5. Mohamed Nazih Omri
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  6. Ali Mili
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ali Mili .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Systems Group, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Marten van Sinderen

  2. Institute of Business Informatics, Wrocław University of Economics, Wrocław, Poland

    Leszek A. Maciaszek

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Ayad, A., Marsit, I., Tawfig, S., Loh, J.M., Omri, M.N., Mili, A. (2020). Quantitative Analysis of Mutant Equivalence. In: van Sinderen, M., Maciaszek, L. (eds) Software Technologies. ICSOFT 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52991-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52991-8_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52991-8

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