Empirical evaluation of orthogonality of inter-class mutation operators

Abstract

Mutation testing is a fault-based testing technique which provide strong quality assurance. Mutation testing has a very long history for the procedural programs at unit-level testing, but the research on mutation testing of object-oriented programs is still immature. Recently, inter-class mutation operators are proposed as a comprehensive set of mutation operators for inter-class testing based on classification of object-oriented fault types. However, any analysis has not conducted on inter-class mutation operators. To evaluate the orthogonality of inter-class mutation operators, this paper verifies the design of inter-class mutant operators through three experiments. This thesis apply N-Selective mutation technique to the three experiments. The results of the experiments have shown that each operator in the inter-class mutation operators is orthogonal. It is also shown that the number of the inter-class mutation operators that is used to generate mutants are only two or three operators. Third experiment also says that inter-class mutation operators detect faults which are rarely occurred. As a result, inter-class mutation operators are designed well.