Relationship between mutant utility and statement blocks

Abstract

Mutation testing is a fault-based software testing technique that can be used to measure the fault detection ability of a test set. However, high cost of the mutation testing has seriously hindered its wide application in the software testing. The fact shows that most of the mutants in mutation testing are redundant mutants. Recent researches have proposed using the subsuming mutants to reduce the number of redundant mutants. However, the existing algorithms are inefficient in identifying the subsuming mutants of real projects. This paper based on the concept of mutant utility, and researches on the relationship between mutant utility and the statement blocks. The result shows that the average utility of the mutants at the leaf node or near the leaf node in the block dominator graph is higher than that of the mutants at the other nodes. That is, the average mutant utility is higher in the dominated statement blocks generally.