MuAspectJ: Mutant Generation to Support Measuring the Testability of AspectJ Programs

The impact of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) on testability must be quantified before it can be considered for widespread adoption by industry. One way to measure testability is through mutation analysis (MA). In MA, a mutation tool generates faults for locations in software. Each fault is created in a new version of the software called a mutant. Testability of a location is measured by executing tests against mutants and counting the proportion of mutants that cause test failure. To quantify the testability of approaches to AOSD through MA, mutant generation tools are needed. This paper introduces MuAspectJ, a tool for generating mutants for AspectJ programs, to satisfy this need. The tool is evaluated in terms of the quality of mutants it generates. Assertions reached about the testability of the software under MA are derived by aggregating the testability of each location. The quality of the assertions that can be derived from MA results is only as good as the mutants on which the analysis is based. MuAspectJ is evaluated by benchmarking metrics that indicate the quality of generated mutants against the existing well known Java mutation tool, MuJava. The results validate the quality of the mutants generated by MuAspectJ.