Toward Harnessing High-Level Language Virtual Machines for Further Speeding Up Weak Mutation Testing

High-level language virtual machines (HLL VMs) are now widely used to implement high-level programming languages. To a certain extent, their widespread adoption is due to the software engineering benefits provided by these managed execution environments, for example, garbage collection (GC) and cross-platform portability. Although HLL VMs are widely used, most research has concentrated on high-end optimizations such as dynamic compilation and advanced GC techniques. Few efforts have focused on introducing features that automate or facilitate certain software engineering activities, including software testing. This paper suggests that HLL VMs provide a reasonable basis for building an integrated software testing environment. As a proof-of-concept, we have augmented a Java virtual machine (JVM) to support weak mutation analysis. Our mutation-aware HLL VM capitalizes on the relationship between a program execution and the underlying managed execution environment, thereby speeding up the execution of the program under test and its associated mutants. To provide some evidence of the performance of our implementation, we conducted an experiment to compare the efficiency of our VM-based implementation with a strong mutation testing tool (muJava). Experimental results show that the VM-based implementation achieves speedups of as much as 89% in some cases.