Research Center Talk “Mutation Levels: Selecting Effective Mutation Operators for Mutation Testing”

In our Research Center Talks, the Info Support research center takes you on a tour of new developments that will (soon) become relevant in our work practice, coming from graduation research and research by study Info Supporters. The first Research Center Talk will take place on April 13th.

18:00 – 19:00 h. – Dinner

18:50 – 19:00 h. – Walk in

19:00 – 19:10 h. – Welcome by Info Support Research center

19:10 – 20:00 h. – Mutation Levels: Selecting Effective Mutation Operators for Mutation Testing By Jan Smits

20:00 – 20:15 h. – Q&A

Mutation testing is a powerful testing technique that injects syntactical faults, called mutants, into a program. This is used to measure the effectiveness of the test suite: the more mutants are detected by it, the better the test suite. However, each mutant must be tested by the test suite and there are many mutants possible. Mutation testing is therefore very costly and has not seen wide use in the software industry.

Jan Smits describes a methodology to lower the performance cost of mutation testing by reducing the number of used mutation operators, which govern what types of mutants are generated. The challenge is to select subsets of mutation operators, called mutation levels, such that mutation testing is still effective. To achieve this, mutation operators are analyzed by determining their performance impact and calculating their quality using a pre-existing quality metric. The focus is on operators that can generate hard-to-detect mutants, such that the creation of high-quality test cases is encouraged. Mutation levels can then be designed using the produced analysis.

During this presentation Jan will explain the value of mutation levels, describe his methodology and shows its application in Stryker, an open-source mutation testing framework supported by Info Support.

About this Research Center Talk

Topic: Mutation Levels: Selecting Effective Mutation Operators for Mutation Testing.
Speaker: Jan Smits
Date: Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Time: 19:00 – 20:15
Location: Kruisboog 42, 3905 TG Veenendaal and Microsoft Teams
Session will be in English