Mutation Testing: An Artificial Immune System Approach

Through time, many software engineering fundamentals change such as programming languages, paradigms and development teams. These changes affect test suites; if these suites do not evolve, they will wear out. Mutation testing is a computationally expensive, fault-based testing method. By using high quality test data however, only a minimal number of mutations are required, allowing changes in the development environment. Initially however, test data is rarely of high quality. To improve it necessitates more mutations. The focus of this conceptual paper is the adoption of an immune system metaphor as the basis for an alternative mutation testing system. It is envisaged that such a system, through careful monitoring of program development, will be able to provide a minimal set of effective mutations and test cases; a vaccine which can be applied to the software development process to help protect it