Analogies and Differences between Mutation Operators for WS-BPEL 2.0 and Other Languages

Applying mutation testing to a program written in a certain language requires that a set of mutation operators is defined for that language. The mutation operators need to adequately cover the features of that language in order to be effective. In this work, we evaluate qualitatively the operators defined for the Web Services Business Process Execution Language 2.0 (WS-BPEL) and study the differences and similarities between WS-BPEL and other languages. We review the existing operators for several structured and object-oriented general-purpose programming languages, and for several domain-specific languages. Results confirm that WS-BPEL is very different from other languages, as half of the mutation operators for this language are equivalent to those of other languages. Our study concludes that the set of WS-BPEL mutation operators can be improved.