A Solution For Improving The Effectiveness of Higher Order Mutation Testing

Testing plays a crucial role in software development for ensuring quality. Mutation testing in general and higher order mutation in particular are the good techniques to evaluate the quality of test data, i.e. determining if test data can uncover errors. However, higher order mutation is often very costly because of huge number of generated mutants. In this work, we focus on reducing the cost of higher order mutation testing. We propose different strategies to combine first order mutants to generate less number of higher order mutants for a program under test, but keep the quality of generated mutants. The proposed strategies are experimented on a set of different programs and the results show the effectiveness in terms of number of generated mutants and mutation score.