Survey on Object Oriented Mutation Testing

Software testing is very important phase in software development. Various testing techniques are used with intention of finding software bugs. Different approaches are suggested to perform application testing, testers shall choose testing techniques in terms of cost and efficiency. Mutation testing is fault based testing technique which is widely used over decades. Several module and class testing techniques have been applied to object-oriented programs, but researchers have only recently begun developing test criteria that evaluate the use of key OO features such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. Mutation testing is a powerful testing technique for generating software tests and evaluating the quality of software. However, the cost of mutation testing has traditionally been so high it cannot be applied without full automated tool support. paper presents a method to reduce the execution cost of mutation testing for OO programs by using two key technologies, Mutant Schemata Generation (MSG) and byte code translation. This method adapts the existing MSG method for mutants that change the program behavior and uses byte code translation for mutants that change the program structure. A key advantage is in performance only two compilations are required and both the compilation and execution time for each is greatly reduced. A mutation tool based on the MSG/byte code translation method has been built and used to measure the speedup over the separate compilation approach.