Design and implementation of fault injection based on abstract syntax tree of C Program

Abstract

Mutation testing is a fault-based technique to evaluate test quality by injecting bugs in programs under test. Traditional manual fault injection has many disadvantages such as inefficiency, large workload, low compilation success rate and so on. To improve the efficiency of fault injection, this paper aims to develop an automatic tool that supports fault injection for programs written in C. This paper first introduces the types of mutation operators and injection rules. Then, it proposes a framework, which mainly includes four modules: parser, fault location extraction, fault generation and data model. Finally, experiments show that our tool not only aids to produce a large number of program faults but also provides syntax-correct mutant programs, which would be further used in mutation testing.