Mutation Based Testing of P Systems

Although testing is an essential part of software development, until recently, P system testing has been completely neglected. Mutation testing (mutation analysis) is a structural software testing method which involves modifying the program in small ways. Mutation analysis has been largely used in white-box testing, but only a few tentative attempts to use this idea in black-box testing have been reported in the literature. In this paper, we provide a formal way of generating mutants for systems specified by contextfree grammars. Furthermore, the paper shows how the proposed method can be used to construct mutants for a P system specification, thus making a significant progress in the area of P system testing.