Mutant Execution Cost Reduction: Through MUSIC (Mutant Schema Improved with Extra Code)

Mutation testing is a very effective testing technique that creates mutants (copies of the original system with small syntactic changes) in order to design test cases that kill the mutants (identifying the syntactic changes). The main disadvantage of mutation testing is its high costs: creating mutants, executing mutants and calculating the mutation score. This paper describes the MUSIC technique, an improvement of the cost reduction technique Mutant Schema, which is meant to reduce the number of required executions and identify infinite loops at a reduced cost. Besides, an experiment was performed to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of MUSIC and identify possible ways to improved it. As a result, we conclude that MUSIC reduces the execution cost of mutation testing and its application is therefore recommended.