Mutation testing tools- An empirical study

Prevailing code coverage techniques in software testing such as condition coverage, branch coverage are thoroughness indicators, rather than the test suites capabilities to detect the fault. Mutation testing can be prospected as a fault based technique that extent the effectiveness of test suites for localization of faults. Generating and running vast number of mutants against the test cases is arduous and time- consuming. Therefore, the use of mutation testing in software industry is uncommon. Hence, an automated, fast and reliable tool for the same is required to perform mutation testing. Various Mutation testing tools exists for the software industry. In this paper, various available tools are studied and based on the study; a comparison is made between these Mutation testing tools. An inference is made that all the available tools are language dependent or need to be configured differently for different languages to generate and run test cases. Comparative study reveals that most of available Mutation testing tools are in Java language and possess many important features while less number of tools is available for other languages like C, C++, C# and FORTRAN.