Mutation Testing Techniques for Android Applications: A Comparative Study

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly used to achieve various computing needs. Hence, it is essential to guarantee quality of the applications. Software testing has been the main activity for ensuring the quality of software, however, it is a critical and costly activity. Furthermore, code coverage is commonly used as metric for verifying the effectiveness of testing technique. However, numerous researchers and experts claimed that considering code coverage only to ascertain the testing quality is not enough to ensure quality of apps. In view of this, mutation testing has been introduced to complement the procedure by assuring that apps behave as expected and are released free of faults. Several techniques/tools were proposed based on different syntax and mutation operators. This study presents a comparative study of six (6) mutation techniques/tools for Android applications to highlight their strengths and weakness which will give an insight to researchers on the directions for further research.