Goal-Oriented Mutation Testing with Focal Methods
This work addresses efficiency issues in software testing for developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing mutation testing techniques.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of mutation testing by using fine-grained traceability links at the method level, achieving a speed-up of 573.5x for mutants in focal methods with an 80% quality score.
Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for each and every injected mutant. In this paper we explore fine-grained traceability links at method level (named focal methods), to reduce the execution time of mutation testing and to verify the quality of the test cases for each individual method, instead of the usually verified overall test suite quality. Validation of our approach on the open source Apache Ant project shows a speed-up of 573.5x for the mutants located in focal methods with a quality score of 80%.