Advantages of Mutation in Passive Testing: An Empirical Study

This paper presents an empirical study of the mutation techniques used by the tool PASTE. This tool allows the automation of our passive testing methodology for systems that present stochastic-time information. In our proposal, invariants express the fact that each time the implementation under test performs a given sequence of actions, then it must exhibit a behavior according to the probability distribution functions reflected in the invariant. We briefly review the theoretical framework of our methodology and the main features of our tool. Next, we present in detail the mutants module that provides us with a functionality to test the effectiveness of invariants for detecting errors. Finally, we present a study of the results obtained from the performed experiments.