Interface Mutation: an approach for integration testing

摘要

The need for test adequacy criteria is widely recognized. Severalncriteria have been proposed for the assessment of adequacy of tests atnthe unit level. However, there remains a lack of criteria for thenassessment of the adequacy of tests generated during integrationntesting. We present a mutation based interprocedural criterion, namednInterface Mutation (IM), suitable for use during integration testing. Ancase study to evaluate the proposed criterion is reported. In the study,nthe UNIX sort utility was seeded with errors and Interface Mutationnevaluated by measuring the cost of its application and its errornrevealing effectiveness. Alternative IM criteria using different sets ofnInterface Mutation operators were also evaluated. While comparing thenerror revealing effectiveness of these Interface Mutation-based testnsets with same size randomly generated test sets, we observed that innmost cases Interface Mutation based test sets are superior. The resultsnsuggest that Interface Mutation offers a viable test adequacy criterianfor use at the integration level