Quality evaluation of object-oriented and standard mutation operators applied to C# programs

Abstract

Mutation testing is a kind of fault injection approach that can be used to generate tests or to assess the quality of test sets. For object-oriented languages, like C#, both object-oriented and standard (traditional) mutation operators should be applied. The methods that can contribute to reducing the number of applied operators and lowering the costs of mutation testing were experimentally investigated. We extended the CREAM mutation tool to support selective testing, sampling and clustering of mutants, and combining code coverage with mutation testing. We propose an approach to quality evaluation and present experimental results of mutation operators applied to C# programs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.