Evaluating N-Selective Mutation for C Programs: Unit and Integration Testing

Mutation Testing has been found to be an effective fault revealing criterion. However, its high cost of application, mainly due to the high number of mutants created and the effort to determine the equivalent mutants, has motivated the position of alternative approaches for its application. One of them, named N-Selective Mutation, aims at reducing the number of generated mutants through a reduction on the number of generated mutants through a reduction on the number of the most prevalent mutant operators expecting that would not occur a significant reduction on the effectiveness. Previously, other researchers investigated the N-Selective Mutation in the context of FORTRAN language, for the unit testing. The results showed that it is possible to have a large cost reduction preserving a high mutation score. Recently, the underlying mutation concept has seen explored at the integration testing phase by the proposition of the Interface Mutation criterion. In the same research line, this work investigates the N-Selective Mutation for C programs, considering the unit and the integration testing phases, in the perspective of contributing to the establishment of low-cost, effective mutation-based testing strategies. N-Selective Mutation is also compared with other Selective Mutation criteria as well as with Randomly Selected Mutation.