research-article

Trivial compiler equivalence: a large scale empirical study of a simple, fast and effective equivalent mutant detection technique

Authors:

Mike Papadakis,

Yves Le TraonAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '15: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

Pages 936 - 946

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Identifying equivalent mutants remains the largest impediment to the widespread uptake of mutation testing. Despite being researched for more than three decades, the problem remains. We propose Trivial Compiler Equivalence (TCE) a technique that exploits the use of readily available compiler technology to address this long-standing challenge. TCE is directly applicable to real-world programs and can imbue existing tools with the ability to detect equivalent mutants and a special form of useless mutants called duplicated mutants. We present a thorough empirical study using 6 large open source programs, several orders of magnitude larger than those used in previous work, and 18 benchmark programs with hand-analysis equivalent mutants. Our results reveal that, on large real-world programs, TCE can discard more than 7% and 21% of all the mutants as being equivalent and duplicated mutants respectively. A human-based equivalence verification reveals that TCE has the ability to detect approximately 30% of all the existing equivalent mutants.

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Cited By

Ma WChekam TPapadakis MHarman M(2021)MuDeltaProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00086(897-909)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00086
Ruland SLuthmann LBürdek JLity SThüm TLochau MRibeiro M(2020)Measuring effectiveness of sample-based product-line testingACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3393934.327813053:9(119-133)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3393934.3278130
Arrieta AAgirre JSagardui GCoello Coello C(2020)Seeding strategies for multi-objective test case selectionProceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3377930.3389810(1222-1231)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2020
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Index Terms

Trivial compiler equivalence: a large scale empirical study of a simple, fast and effective equivalent mutant detection technique
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
      1. Program analysis
    2. Program semantics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '15: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

May 2015

999 pages

ISBN:9781479919345

General Chair:
Antonia Bertolino
ISTI-CNR, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Gerardo Canfora
University of Sannio, Italy
,
Sebastian Elbaum
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

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Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Cited By

Ma WChekam TPapadakis MHarman M(2021)MuDeltaProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00086(897-909)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00086
Ruland SLuthmann LBürdek JLity SThüm TLochau MRibeiro M(2020)Measuring effectiveness of sample-based product-line testingACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3393934.327813053:9(119-133)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3393934.3278130
Arrieta AAgirre JSagardui GCoello Coello C(2020)Seeding strategies for multi-objective test case selectionProceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3377930.3389810(1222-1231)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377930.3389810
Guo RGu TYao YXu FMa X(2019)Speedup Automatic Program Repair Using Dynamic Software UpdatingProceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3361242.3361245(1-10)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3361242.3361245
Dallilo LPizzoleto AFerrari FMachado ISouza RMaciel RSant'Anna C(2019)An Evaluation of Internal Program Metrics as Predictors of Mutation Operator ScoreProceedings of the IV Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing10.1145/3356317.3356323(12-21)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3356317.3356323
Andrade SBrito CJúnior MMarciel AAbdalla GDelamaro MMachado ISouza RMaciel RSant'Anna C(2019)Analyzing the effectiveness of One-Op Mutation against the minimal set of mutantsProceedings of the IV Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing10.1145/3356317.3356321(22-31)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3356317.3356321
Chekam TPapadakis MLe Traon YDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Mart: a mutant generation tool for LLVMProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3341180(1080-1084)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
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Markiegi UArrieta AEtxeberria LSagardui GHung CPapadopoulos G(2019)Test case selection using structural coverage in software product lines for time-budget constrained scenariosProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3297512(2362-2371)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297280.3297512
Delgado-Pérez PSegura SHung CPapadopoulos G(2019)Study of trivial compiler equivalence on C++ object-oriented mutation operatorsProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3297499(2224-2230)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297280.3297499
Shi ABell JMarinov DZhang DMøller A(2019)Mitigating the effects of flaky tests on mutation testingProceedings of the 28th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3293882.3330568(112-122)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
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