Poster: Subsuming Mutation Operators

Though minimal mutations were widely studied in recent years, the operators that produce these mutants remain largely unknown. This poster develops a coverage-based approach to identify them by defining Subsuming Mutation Operators (SMOs), the operators that cover all subsuming ones with minimal number of mutants. We then performed an empirical study on 61,000 mutants of 14 programs to determine SMOs among Proteum operators and investigate their properties. The results show only 17 of 82 operators are SMOs and they are not equally significant. For example, OLRN produces only 0.5% of subsuming mutants while VDTR accounts for almost 20%. A set of operators that are efficient at producing subsuming mutants are identified in our study and presented in this paper.