ICST 2021
Mon 12 - Fri 16 April 2021
Mon 12 Apr 2021 10:16 - 10:33 at Tamandaré - Session 1

Mutation analysis is the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of a test suite to prevent bugs. It involves generating variants (mutants) of the program under test, and checking whether the test suite detects the mutant. A tester relies on the live mutants to decide what test cases to write for improving the test suite effectiveness. However, while a majority of such syntactic changes result in detectable semantic differences from the original, it is, however, possible that such a change fails to induce a semantic change. Such \emph{equivalent} mutants can lead to wastage of manual effort.

We describe a novel technique that produces high quality mutants while avoiding generation of equivalent mutants for input processors. Our idea is to generate plausible, near correct inputs for the program, collect those rejected, and generate variants that accept these rejected strings. Our technique allows us to provide an enhanced set of mutants along with newly generated test cases that kill them.

We evaluate our method on eight python programs and show that our technique can generate new mutants that are both interesting for the developer and guaranteed to be mortal.

Mon 12 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

10:00 - 10:50
10:00
16m
Short-paper
Efficiently Sampling Higher Order Mutants Using Causal Effect
Mutation
Saeyoon Oh Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Seongmin Lee Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Shin Yoo Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
10:16
16m
Full-paper
Inducing Subtle Mutations with Program RepairBest Paper Award
Mutation
Florian Schwander , Rahul Gopinath CISPA, Germany, Andreas Zeller CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
10:33
16m
Short-paper
Automatic Equivalent Mutants Classification Using Abstract Syntax Tree Neural Networks
Mutation
Samuel Peacock Towson University, Lin Deng Towson University, Josh Dehlinger Towson University, Suranjan Chakraborty Towson University