The null-type is a major source of faults in Java programs, and its overuse has a severe impact on software maintenance. Unfortunately traditional mutation testing operators do not cover null-type faults by default, hence cannot be used as a preventive measure. We address this problem by designing four new mutation operators which model null-type faults explicitly. We show how these mutation operators are capable of revealing the missing tests, and we demonstrate that these mutation operators are useful in practice. For the latter, we analyze the test suites of 15 open-source projects to describe the trade-offs related to the adoption of these operators to strengthen the test suite.
CITATION STYLE
Parsai, A., & Demeyer, S. (2019). Do null-type mutation operators help prevent null-type faults? In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 11376 LNCS, pp. 419–434). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10801-4_33
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.