Multi objective higher order mutation testing with GP

Abstract

Mutation testing is a powerful software engineering technique for fault finding. It works by injecting known faults (mutations) into software and seeing if the test suite finds them. It remains very expensive and the few valuable traditional mutants that resemble real faults are mixed in with many others that denote unrealistic faults. The expense and lack of realism inhibit industrial uptake of mutation testing. Genetic programming searches the space of complex faults to find realistic higher order mutants. Despite the much larger search space, we have found mutants composed of multiple changes to the C source code that challenge the tester and which cannot be represented in the first order space.