A. J. Offutt and W. M. Craft. Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. The Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, 4(3):131-- 154, September 1994.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....are many cases where an automated tool is capable of detecting equivalence. If this threshold can be suciently raised, with only a small number of mutants remaining for human checking, then this may open up the way for mutation to move from research labs into industry. In 1994 O utt and Craft ( O utt and Craft, 1994] implemented and evaluated Baldwin and Sayward s ( Baldwin and Sayward, 1979] heuristics for detecting equivalent mutants. The idea is that compiler optimisation techniques create equivalent programs using small mutations , and so these optimising transformations can be thought of as idioms ....

Outt, A. J. and Craft, W. M. (1994). Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. The Journal of Software Testing, Verication, and Reliability, 4:131-154.

....are many cases where an automated tool is capable of detecting equivalence. If this threshold can be suciently raised, with only a small number of mutants remaining for human checking, then this may open up the way for mutation to move from research labs into industry. In 1994 O utt and Craft ( O utt and Craft, 1994] implemented and evaluated Baldwin and Sayward s ( Baldwin and Sayward, 1979] heuristics for detecting equivalent mutants. The idea is that compiler optimisation techniques create equivalent programs using small mutations , and so these optimising transformations can be thought of as idioms ....

Outt, A. J. and Craft, W. M. (1994). Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. Software Testing, Verication and Reliability, 4:131-154.

....These programs are said to be equivalent. Previous papers have presented ways to speed up mutation testing [How82, OLR 96, DO91, UOH93] including a technique for partially solving the problem of automatically detecting equivalent mutants that was based on compiler optimization techniques [OC94] Equivalent mutants are currently detected by hand, which makes it very expensive and time consuming. This paper presents a new technique for partial detection of equivalent mutants based on constraint based testing that gives much better results than the compiler optimization techniques. The ....

....1: Mothra Mutation Operators for Fortran 77. percentage of the total number of equivalent mutants represented by each type. The third column gives the percentage of all mutants that are equivalent of that type in the programs studied, 9.1 of the mutants were equivalent. Offutt and Craft [OC94] and Budd [Bud80] give similar statistics of the distribution of equivalent mutants among mutant types. Both sources indicate one very interesting fact. One mutant type, absolute value insertion (abs) has many more equivalent mutants than any other mutant type. The abs mutant operator inserts ....

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A. J. Offutt and W. M. Craft. Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. The Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, 4(3):131-- 154, September 1994.

.... equivalent programs is in general undecidable [51] the idea of using compileroptimization techniques to recognize some if not most equivalent mutants was suggested by Baldwin and Sayward in 1979 [52] This technique was tried in a limited way by hand in Tanaka s 1981 thesis [53] O utt and Craft [54] re ned, extended, and implemented the Baldwin and Sayward suggestions in a tool that was integrated with Mothra. This led directly to the idea of using constraint based testing to detect equivalent mutants, which was implemented in a tool that detected almost 50 of the equivalent mutants [55, ....

A. J. Outt and W. M. Craft, \Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants," The Journal of Software Testing, Verication, and Reliability, vol. 4, pp. 131-154, September 1994.

....these dead mutants are not run against any additional test cases. Some mutants, although syntactically different, are functionally identical to the original program. We call these equivalent mutants. Although some progress has been made in automatically identifying which mutants are equivalent [4, 18], this remains a time consuming manual task. Since no test case can kill these equivalent mutants, they must be removed from consideration in assessing test data quality. The ratio of dead mutants to the remaining undifferentiated live mutants is an indicator of test set quality. In mutation ....

A. Jefferson Offutt and William Michael Craft. Using Compiler Optimization Techniques to Detect Equivalent Mutants. Technical Report 92-102, Department of Information and Software Systems Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, November 1992.

....The first column in the table gives the mutant operator type and the second column gives the percentage of the total number of equivalent mutants represented by each type. The third column gives the percentage of all mutants that are equivalent of that type. Table 2 from Offutt and Craft s paper [OC94] and Table 3 from Budd s dissertation [Bud80] show the statistics of distribution of equivalent mutants among mutant types, too. Note that the sets of programs used for the three sets of statistics are different, and Budd s was based on a different mutation system. These three statistics ....

....a common testing heuristic) 7 Mutant Type of Equivalent of All Mutants abs 54.3 3.40 scr 16.1 1.70 acr 11.2 0.25 asr 3.9 0.19 svr 3.1 0.18 uoi 3.0 0.15 ror 2.4 0.07 all others 6.0 0.30 total 100.00 6. 24 Table 2: Equivalent Mutants among Mutant Types From Offutt and Craft [OC94] Mutant Type of Equivalent of All Mutants abs 75.0 4.0 glr 12.0 0.7 ror 7.5 0.5 all others 5.5 0.5 total 100.00 5.7 Table 3: Equivalent Mutants among Mutant Types From Budd [Bud80] 8 2.2 Motivation for Automatically Detecting Equivalent Mutants It is obvious that one motivation ....

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A. J. Offutt and W. M. Craft. Using compiler optimization techniques to detect equivalent mutants. The Journal of Software Testing, Verification, and Reliability, 4(3), 1994. Accepted for publication.

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