Last week my MSc student, Kevin Jalbert, presented his early thesis results at the Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE 2012). The workshop took place in Zurich Switzerland and was colocated with ICSE 2012. The title of the presentation (and the paper that appears in the proceedings) was “Predicting Mutation Score Using Source Code and Test Suite Metrics.” The paper was awarded the Best Paper Award at the workshop.
Mutation testing can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites and can also be used as an oracle during the creation or improvement of test suites. Mutation testing works by creating many versions of a program each with a single syntactic fault. These program versions are created using mutation operators which are based on an existing fault taxonomy (i.e., a set of known fault types that we are trying to find during testing). One mutation operator, Relational Operator Replacement (ROR), could create a new mutant version of the program in which one of the instance of a relational operator (e.g., <) is replaced with a different operator. For example, line 3 of the following Java source code:Continue reading “Predicting Mutation Scores”
