To Detect Abnormal Program Behaviours via Mutation Deduction
Jie M. Zhang, Dan Hao, Lingming Zhang, Lu Zhang · 2018
This paper presents Mutation Deduction, a methodology framework that explores the behaviours of a program under test through exploring the behaviours of its mutants. Mutation Deduction makes use of the relationship between the syntactic changes and semantic changes of a program under test: a new type of metamorphic relation. A metamorphic? relation is supposed to hold as long as the program is correct. Once a metamorphic relation is violated, one could deem that abnormal behaviours exist. The framework is supposed to apply to both single-version and multi-version scenarios. It enlarges the behaviour space that the current test inputs could explore, which could help observe more abnormal behaviours and better ensure software quality.