Systematic Literature Review on Search Based Mutation Testing

Search based techniques have been widely applied in the domain of software testing. This Systematic Literature Review aims to present the research carried out in the field of search based approaches applied particularly to mutation testing. During the course of literature review, renowned databases were searched for the relevant publications in the field to include relevant studies up to the year 2014. Few studies for the year 2015–2016, gathered by performing snowball search, have also been included. For reviewing the literature in the field, 43 studies were evaluated, out of which 18 studies were thoroughly studied and analysed. The result of this SLR shows that search based techniques were applied to mutation testing primarily for two purposes, either for mutant optimisation or for test case optimisation. The future directions of this SLR suggests the application of search based techniques for other issues related to mutation testing, like, solution to equivalents mutants, generation of non-trivial mutants, multi-objective test data generation and non-functional testing.