An Empirical Evaluation of Weak Mutation

Mutation testing is a fault-based technique for unit level software testing. Weak mutation was proposed as a way to reduce the expense of mutation testing. Unfortunately, weak mutation is also expected to provide a weaker test of the software than mutation testing does. This paper presents results from an implementation of weak mutation, which we used to evaluate the e ectiveness versus the e ciency of weak mutation. Additionally, we examined several options in an attempt to nd the most appropriate way to implement weak mutation. Our results indicate that weak mutation can be applied in a manner that is almost as e ective as mutation testing, and with signi cant computational savings.