Extended Firm Mutation Testing: A Cost Reduction Technique for Mutation Testing

All the white-box testing techniques are to check the quality of code but unable to test the quality of test cases. Mutation testing is the most effective testing technique to evaluate the quality of a test sets, but it also encounters a number of problems to do so. These problems prevent the mutation testing technique to become practical. The major problem is the very high computational cost that occurs due to execution of mutants. The usage of mutation testing restrict by its high computation cost. In order to the practical use to mutation testing, various cost reduction techniques were proposed. In this paper, we first investigate the advantages and disadvantages of existing cost reduction techniques and then propose a new execution based technique to reduce the cost of mutation testing.