一种变异测试中冗余变异体的寻找方法

变异测试是一种有效的基于故障的测试方法,但大量冗余变异体所带来的昂贵的测试成本问题,阻碍了它在实际工程开发中的应用.为解决该问题,本文针对程序中的顺序语句所产生的变异体,基于故障的可达-感染-传播模型,提出了使用区间抽象域来表示程序状态,通过区间运算判断变异体之间冗余关系的算法;针对程序中的条件语句,基于谓词故障层级,分别给出了面向简单谓词和复合谓词的冗余变异体选择算法.并对这两种算法对冗余变异体的判定效果进行了分析,最后给出了在分层抽样背景下,非冗余变异体生成的约束边界条件.对Siemens和开源项目等共8个工程进行了实验,并与随机选择法进行了对比.结果表明,本文所提方法在减少变异测试时间成本的同时,可以保持较高的变异得分.

A Method for Finding Redundant Mutants in Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is an effective fault-based testing method.However,the application of mutation testing in engineering development has been restricted by the high testing costs caused by a large number of redundant mutants.Regarding the mutants arising from the sequential statements in a program,an algorithm based on propagation-infection-execution (PIE) model was proposed,which employs the interval abstract domain to represent program state and the interval algorithm to evaluate the redundancy relation between the mutants.Meanwhile,regarding the conditional statements in a program,the redundant mutant selection algorithms based on the predicate fault hierarchy are also presented.The algorithms are designed for simple predicate and compound predicate respectively.By analyzing the effects of these algorithms,the constrained boundary condition for the development of non-redundant mutants under the condition of stratified sampling is concluded.Siemens Test Suite and other three open source projects are used to conduct experiments to compare the proposed method with random selection method.Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the mutant testing time cost while maintaining a high mutation score.