Game Theoretic Framework to Mutation Testing

Abstract

Mutation testing is an intuitive approach to test errors in software as well as to measure the quality of test suites. Due to its prohibitively high computation cost for generating all mutants, different approaches have been proposed to alleviate the cost. In this paper, first we introduce such efforts and then propose a new framework, mutation game. We formulate a game between Tester who wants to kill mutants and Demon who supports living mutants. We also propose strategies and an algorithm for the repeated game.