Towards Automating the Generation of Mutation Tests

摘要

Automating software testing activities can increase the quality and drastically decrease the cost of software development. Towards this direction various automated test data generation tools have been developed. The majority of them aim at branch testing, while a quite limited number aim at a higher level of testing thoroughness such as mutation. In this paper an automated framework that makes a joint use of diverse techniques and tools is introduced in the context of automating mutation based test generation. The motivation behind this work is the use of existing techniques and tools such as symbolic execution and evolutionary testing towards automating the test input generation activity according to the weak mutation testing criterion. The proposed framework integrates existing automated tools for branch testing in order to effectively generate mutation test data. To fulfill this suggestion three automated tools are used for illustration purposes and preliminary results are obtained by applying the proposed framework to a set of Java program units indicating the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.