Towards Automated Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is a fault based testing technique used to find the effectiveness of test cases. It is a powerful and computationally expensive technique to find the adequacy of test cases. One of the major disadvantages of mutation testing is compiling and executing the faulty versions of the original programs (called mutants) with all the provided test cases. Hence this process should be automated. Research has been done to generate the tools to automate the mutation process in procedural languages. Some projects have been based around extending mutation testing for Object-Oriented (OO) programming languages because of its growing importance. Some tools have been developed but are not reliable. In this research, we are trying to address the limitations of a current mutation testing tool, called MU, developed by Mattias Bybro. We are also building a tool to generate the test cases automatically and integrating this with the modified mutation testing tool.