Targeted Mutation: Efficient Mutation Analysis for Testing Non-Functional Properties

Mutation analysis has proven to be a strong technique for software testing. Unfortunately, it is also computationally expensive and researchers have therefore proposed several different approaches to reduce the effort. None of these reduction techniques however, focuses on non-functional properties. Given that our goal is to create a strong test suite for testing a certain non-functional property, which mutants should be used? In this paper, we introduce the concept of targeted mutation, which focuses mutation effort to those parts of the code where a change can make a difference with respect to the targeted non-functional property. We show how targeted mutation can be applied to derive efficient test suites for estimating the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET). We use program slicing to direct the mutations to the parts of the code that are likely to have the strongest influence on execution time. Finally, we outline an experimental procedure for how to evaluate the technique.