Change-aware mutation testing for evolving systems
Miloš Ojdanić · Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering · 2022
Although the strongest test criteria, traditional mutation testing has shown to not scale with modern incremental development practices. In this work, we describe our proposal of commit-aware mutation testing and introduce the concept of commit-relevant mutants suitable to evaluate the system's behaviour after being affected by regression changes. We show that commit-relevant mutants represent a small but effective set that assesses the delta of behaviours between two consecutive software versions. Commit-aware mutation testing provides the guidance for developers to quantify to which extent they have tested error-prone locations impacted by program changes. In this paper, we portray our efforts to make mutation criteria change-aware as we study characteristics of commit-relevant mutants striving to bring mutation testing closer to being worthwhile for evolving systems.