Treffer: Improving the effectiveness of incremental mutation testing using data flow analysis

B.SC.IT(HONS) ; With the increase in software use, the importance of having good quality test suites likewise increases. In order to have confidence in a system, one must have confidence that the test suite is adequate. Mutation testing which can be used to find any shortcomings in a test suite, is a fault injection testing technique, which creates faulty versions of a program and executes them against the test suite to check if it detects the faults. While effective, it has a large computational expense which makes it difficult to use in the industry. To reduce this problem, Incremental Mutation testing was introduced. This approach only applies Mutation testing to the changed parts of the system. It reduce the computational expense drastically but the parts of the system that are dependent on the changed ones are not included, and this may lead to tests not catching all the faults. This work focuses on improving Incremental Mutation testing by statically analysing the source code and adding the dependent methods to the mutation process through data flow dependencies. The developed approach has been combined with an existing approach which includes the dependent methods through Control Flow Analysis. The obtained results show that this approach makes Mutation testing more efficient, but when combined with the Control Flow approach due to the fast executing test suite, it was not very efficient. ; N/A