A Quality Estimation of Mutation Clustering in C# Programs

Mutation testing tasks are expensive in time and resources. Different cost reduction methods were developed to cope with this problem. In this chapter experimental evaluation of mutation clustering is presented. The approach was applied for object-oriented and standard mutation testing of C# programs. The quality metric was used to compare different solutions. It calculates a tradeoff between mutations score accuracy and mutation costs in terms of number of mutants and number of tests. The results show a substantive decrease in number of mutants and tests while suffering a small decline of mutation score accuracy. However the outcome is not superior to other cost reduction methods, as selective mutation or mutant sampling.