Generating Mutation Tests Using an Equivalence Prover

EasyChair Preprint no. 8629

Abstract

Creating test cases and assessing their quality is a necessary but time-consuming part of software development. Mutation Testing facilitates this process by introducing small syntactic changes into the program and thereby creating mutants. The quality of test cases is then measured by their ability to differentiate between those mutants and the original program. Previous studies have also explored techniques to automatically generate test inputs from program mutants. However, the symbolic approaches to this problem do not handle unbounded loops within the program. In this paper, we present a method using the equivalence prover LLRêve to generate test cases from program mutants. We implemented the method as a pipeline and evaluated it on example programs from the learning platform c4learn as well as programs from the library diet libc. Our results have shown that this method takes up to multiple hours to run on these programs, but the generated test cases are able to detect half of the known errors. As an extension to the method, we also present mutations which introduce an additional parameter into the program. We then show on an example that a finite set of test cases can be sufficient to kill the mutant for all values of the parameter.

Keyphrases: Equivalence Prover, mutation testing, test case generation

@Booklet{EasyChair:8629,
  author = {Christian Martin},
  title = {Generating Mutation Tests Using an Equivalence Prover},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 8629},

  year = {EasyChair, 2022}}