Object oriented mutation testing: A survey

Mutation testing is a fault based testing technique that measures the effectiveness of test case suite and helps to generate test cases that have potential of identifying real faults in the program. Faults are injected using a pre-defined set of mutation operators. Object oriented paradigm is known for its salient features that make it different from traditional programming paradigms. We find traditional mutation operators insufficient and incapable of introducing faults in object oriented features like encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. This paper presents a survey on object oriented mutation testing to find out the issues mutation testing is currently facing and solutions that have been proposed to cater those issues. We have studied various techniques proposed till now and tools that are developed for the aid of testers to perform mutation testing. We analyze these techniques considering the issues in object oriented mutation testing against the solutions they have offered. Our survey concludes that selective mutation testing can reduce the computational cost and experiments on large scale can help identifying potential mutation operators to avoid generation of equivalent mutants.