An Experimental Tool for Search-Based Mutation Testing
Muhammad Bilal Bashir, Aamer Nadeem · 2018
Mutation testing is computationally expensive, but the computational effort can be reduced by using search-based testing techniques like Genetic algorithm. Genetic algorithm helps in automating test data generation process. Automatic test case generation can significantly reduce the resources required to perform software testing. Search-based mutation testing, therefore, becomes attractive for testers to fully exploit the positives of mutation testing without concerning about its computational needs. This paper presents an experimental tool for search-based mutation testing of Java programs. It is fully automated tool that supports object-oriented and structured mutation operators. The implemented tool supports four test case generation techniques. One of them is random testing and rest of the three are variants of Genetic algorithm. It is an open source free ware that can be downloaded and installed in any Java-supported platform. The tool is user-friendly and lets the user to become familiar and learn the tool with ease. We have also presented experimental results in this paper to show the effectiveness of the tool. We strongly believe this tool has got the potential to get attention of testers for experimental studies and we also encourage proposals to extend its feature-base.