Mutation Analysis Approach to Develop Reliable Object-Oriented Software

Monalisa Sarma

doi:10.1155/2014/197983

Abstract

In general, modern programs are large and complex and it is essential that they should be highly reliable in applications. In order to develop highly reliable software, Java programming language developer provides a rich set of exceptions and exception handling mechanisms. Exception handling mechanisms are intended to help developers build robust programs. Given a program with exception handling constructs, for an effective testing, we are to detect whether all possible exceptions are raised and caught or not. However, complex exception handling constructs make it tedious to trace which exceptions are handled and where and which exceptions are passed on. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a mutation analysis approach to develop reliable object-oriented programs. We have applied a number of mutation operators to create a large set of mutant programs with different type of faults. We then generate test cases and test data to uncover exception related faults. The test suite so obtained is applied to the mutant programs measuring the mutation score and hence verifying whether mutant programs are effective or not. We have tested our approach with a number of case studies to substantiate the efficacy of the proposed mutation analysis technique.

Highlights

Of late, computer applications have permeated heavily into every sphere of the daily life of an average person
This paper proposes a number of mutation operators to create mutant programs
We verify the effectiveness of a given test suite, to verify the exception handling constructs

Summary

Introduction

Computer applications have permeated heavily into every sphere of the daily life of an average person. Many of these applications are large, complex, and safety critical, requiring the software to be extremely reliable. It is advocated that software should be tested adequately to trace if there is any exception in intended behavior [2]. To realize this software developers prefer exception handling mechanisms to be embedded inside code so that software can arrest and raise alarm whenever there is any exception and cause of exception can be eliminated. An exception handling mechanism provides a way to separate code that deals with unusual situations and abnormal program termination

Methods

Results

Conclusion