Evaluating Random Mutant Selection at Class-Level in Projects with Non-Adequate Test Suites

Mutation testing is a standard technique to evaluate the quality of a test suite. Due to its computationally intensive nature, many approaches have been proposed to make this technique feasible in real case scenarios. Among these approaches, uniform random mutant selection has been demonstrated to be simple and promising. However, works on this area analyze mutant samples at project level mainly on projects with adequate test suites. In this paper, we fill this lack of empirical validation by analyzing random mutant selection at class level on projects with non-adequate test suites. First, we show that uniform random mutant selection underachieves the expected results. Then, we propose a new approach named weighted random mutant selection which generates more representative mutant samples. Finally, we show that representative mutant samples are larger for projects with high test adequacy.Comment: EASE 2016, Article 11 , 10 page

Mutation testing on an object-oriented framework: An experience report

This is the preprint version of the article - Copyright @ 2011 ElsevierContext The increasing presence of Object-Oriented (OO) programs in industrial systems is progressively drawing the attention of mutation researchers toward this paradigm. However, while the number of research contributions in this topic is plentiful, the number of empirical results is still marginal and mostly provided by researchers rather than practitioners. Objective This article reports our experience using mutation testing to measure the effectiveness of an automated test data generator from a user perspective. Method In our study, we applied both traditional and class-level mutation operators to FaMa, an open source Java framework currently being used for research and commercial purposes. We also compared and contrasted our results with the data obtained from some motivating faults found in the literature and two real tools for the analysis of feature models, FaMa and SPLOT. Results Our results are summarized in a number of lessons learned supporting previous isolated results as well as new findings that hopefully will motivate further research in the field. Conclusion We conclude that mutation testing is an effective and affordable technique to measure the effectiveness of test mechanisms in OO systems. We found, however, several practical limitations in current tool support that should be addressed to facilitate the work of testers. We also missed specific techniques and tools to apply mutation testing at the system level.This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and Spanish Government under CICYT Project SETI (TIN2009-07366) and the Andalusian Government Projects ISABEL (TIC-2533) and THEOS (TIC-5906)

Empirical Evaluation of Test Coverage for Functional Programs

The correlation between test coverage and test effectiveness is important to justify the use of coverage in practice. Existing results on imperative programs mostly show that test coverage predicates effectiveness. However, since functional programs are usually structurally different from imperative ones, it is unclear whether the same result may be derived and coverage can be used as a prediction of effectiveness on functional programs. In this paper we report the first empirical study on the correlation between test coverage and test effectiveness on functional programs. We consider four types of coverage: as input coverages, statement/branch coverage and expression coverage, and as oracle coverages, count of assertions and checked coverage. We also consider two types of effectiveness: raw effectiveness and normalized effectiveness. Our results are twofold. (1) In general the findings on imperative programs still hold on functional programs, warranting the use of coverage in practice. (2) On specific coverage criteria, the results may be unexpected or different from the imperative ones, calling for further studies on functional programs

Is the Stack Distance Between Test Case and Method Correlated With Test Effectiveness?

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However, despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant computational effort and has not been widely adopted in industry. Therefore, we study in this paper whether test effectiveness can be approximated using a more light-weight approach. We hypothesize that a test case is more likely to detect faults in methods that are close to the test case on the call stack than in methods that the test case accesses indirectly through many other methods. Based on this hypothesis, we propose the minimal stack distance between test case and method as a new test measure, which expresses how close any test case comes to a given method, and study its correlation with test effectiveness. We conducted an empirical study with 21 open-source projects, which comprise in total 1.8 million LOC, and show that a correlation exists between stack distance and test effectiveness. The correlation reaches a strength up to 0.58. We further show that a classifier using the minimal stack distance along with additional easily computable measures can predict the mutation testing result of a method with 92.9% precision and 93.4% recall. Hence, such a classifier can be taken into consideration as a light-weight alternative to mutation testing or as a preceding, less costly step to that.Comment: EASE 201

A Computational Study of Genetic Crossover Operators for Multi-Objective Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows

The article describes an investigation of the effectiveness of genetic algorithms for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) by presenting an application for the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. The work is motivated by the question, if and how the problem structure influences the effectiveness of different configurations of the genetic algorithm. Computational results are presented for different classes of vehicle routing problems, varying in their coverage with time windows, time window size, distribution and number of customers. The results are compared with a simple, but effective local search approach for multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems

The influence of mutation on population dynamics in multiobjective genetic programming

Using multiobjective genetic programming with a complexity objective to overcome tree bloat is usually very successful but can sometimes lead to undesirable collapse of the population to all single-node trees. In this paper we report a detailed examination of why and when collapse occurs. We have used different types of crossover and mutation operators (depth-fair and sub-tree), different evolutionary approaches (generational and steady-state), and different datasets (6-parity Boolean and a range of benchmark machine learning problems) to strengthen our conclusion. We conclude that mutation has a vital role in preventing population collapse by counterbalancing parsimony pressure and preserving population diversity. Also, mutation controls the size of the generated individuals which tends to dominate the time needed for fitness evaluation and therefore the whole evolutionary process. Further, the average size of the individuals in a GP population depends on the evolutionary approach employed. We also demonstrate that mutation has a wider role than merely culling single-node individuals from the population; even within a diversity-preserving algorithm such as SPEA2 mutation has a role in preserving diversity

Evolutionary Approaches to Minimizing Network Coding Resources

We wish to minimize the resources used for network coding while achieving the desired throughput in a multicast scenario. We employ evolutionary approaches, based on a genetic algorithm, that avoid the computational complexity that makes the problem NP-hard. Our experiments show great improvements over the sub-optimal solutions of prior methods. Our new algorithms improve over our previously proposed algorithm in three ways. First, whereas the previous algorithm can be applied only to acyclic networks, our new method works also with networks with cycles. Second, we enrich the set of components used in the genetic algorithm, which improves the performance. Third, we develop a novel distributed framework. Combining distributed random network coding with our distributed optimization yields a network coding protocol where the resources used for coding are optimized in the setup phase by running our evolutionary algorithm at each node of the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by carrying out simulations on a number of different sets of network topologies.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, accepted to the 26th Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2007

Spectrum-Based Fault Localization in Model Transformations

Model transformations play a cornerstone role in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), as they provide the essential mechanisms for manipulating and transforming models. The correctness of software built using MDE techniques greatly relies on the correctness of model transformations. However, it is challenging and error prone to debug them, and the situation gets more critical as the size and complexity of model transformations grow, where manual debugging is no longer possible. Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) uses the results of test cases and their corresponding code coverage information to estimate the likelihood of each program component (e.g., statements) of being faulty. In this article we present an approach to apply SBFL for locating the faulty rules in model transformations. We evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of the approach by comparing the effectiveness of 18 different stateof- the-art SBFL techniques at locating faults in model transformations. Evaluation results revealed that the best techniques, namely Kulcynski2, Mountford, Ochiai, and Zoltar, lead the debugger to inspect a maximum of three rules to locate the bug in around 74% of the cases. Furthermore, we compare our approach with a static approach for fault localization in model transformations, observing a clear superiority of the proposed SBFL-based method.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-70560-RJunta de Andalucía P12-TIC-186