Method-level mutation operators for java programs

Abstract

Although object-oriented programming languages offer powerful programming features, they also introduce certain kinds of faults some which are difficult to detect, diagnose and correct. Many researches have been made on the object-oriented program testing in order to properly handle those object-oriented features, but researches on mutation testing of non-object-oriented features at the method-level was almost neglected. This thesis presents a mutation testing technique aimed at detecting simple faults that are revealed at the method-level. Although the effectiveness of mutation testing depends heavily on mutation operators, previously developed mutation operators for procedural languages are inadequate for the object-oriented languages. Therefore, we have first developed a set of method-level mutation operators designed to alter primitive operators in Java. We have also designed method-level mutation operators are to be directly applied to bytecode instructions since performing mutation analysis using bytecode is more cost effective. As the number of mutants produced by method-level mutation operators is so large, we have chosen a selective set of method-level mutation operators that reduces the number of mutants generated with tolerable effectiveness in mutation testing.