Finding Redundancy in Web Mutation Operators
Upsorn Praphamontripong, Jeff Offutt · 2017
New web development technologies enhance functionality of web applications but also introduce challenges in testing the software. As mutation analysis has been shown to be effective at designing tests for traditional software, we previously proposed web mutation testing. However, applying mutation analysis can be computationally expensive due to an extensive number of test requirements. This paper introduces, evaluates, and refines web mutation operators with the goal of reducing the number of test requirements. This paper evaluates redundancy among web mutation operators by analyzing the types of mutants that can be killed by tests generated specifically to kill other types of mutants and the types of mutants (and the operators that generate them) that can be excluded from testing while maintaining the same level of fault detection. An experimental study was conducted on 12 subject web applications using 15 web mutation operators. The redundancy in web mutation operators is computed as the percentage of the mutants of each operator that are killed by tests designed specifically to kill mutants of other operators. Tests designed specifically to kill mutants of some operators can also kill mutants generated from other operators. Three overlapping web mutation operators (WFUR, WHID, and WLUD) are redundant and can be excluded from mutation testing with minimal loss in fault detection capability.