Investigating the Effectiveness of Object-Oriented Testing Strategies with the Mutation Method

The mutation method assesses test quality by examining the ability of a test set to distinguish syntactic deviations representing specific types of faults from the program under test. This paper describes an empirical study performed to evaluate the effectiveness of object-oriented (OO) test strategies using the mutation method. The test sets for the experimental system are generated according to three selected OO test methods and their effectiveness is compared by determining how well the developed test sets kill injected mutants derived from an established mutation system Mothra, and our own OO-specific mutation technique which is termed Class Mutation.