Comparing search techniques for finding subtle higher order mutants
Elmahdi Omar, Sudipto Ghosh, Darrell Whitley · 2014
Subtle Higher Order Mutants (HOMs) are those HOMs that cannot be killed by existing test suites that kill all First Order Mutants (FOMs) for the program under test. Subtle HOMs simulate complex, real faults, whose behavior cannot be simulated using FOMs. However, due to the coupling effect, subtle HOMs are rare in the exponentially large space of candidate HOMs and they can be costly to find even for small programs.