Mutation Testing – a Practitioner’s Perspective Henry Coles Abstract Henry Coles will discuss the lessons learned from implementing a mutation testing tool for Java and getting people in industry to actually use it. He will look at what industry and academia can learn from each other and suggest some possible future areas for research. Bio Henry Coles is a software developer based in Edinburgh and author of the popular PIT mutation testing tool. His website is at http://ncredinburgh.com/people/henry-coles. Mutation Analysis for the Real World: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Proper Tool Support René Just Abstract (slides) Evaluating testing and debugging techniques is important for practitioners and researchers: developers want to know whether their tests are effective in detecting faults, and researchers want to compare different techniques. Mutation analysis fits this need and has an important advantage over approaches that rely on code coverage: it not only assesses whether a test sufficiently covers the program code but also whether that test’s assertions are effective in revealing faults. The notion of program mutation is also employed in other areas, such as automated test generation, fault localization, or automated program repair. There is, however, surprisingly little evidence that mutants are a valid substitute for real faults, and recent research has shown that not all mutants contribute equally to the power of mutation analysis. Furthermore, mutation analysis still suffers from scalability issues and involves substantial human effort, which hampers a widespread adoption. In this talk, I will address recent advances in the area of mutation analysis and discuss open challenges with a focus on effectiveness, efficiency, and tool support. Bio René Just is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His main research interests are in software engineering and software security, in particular static and dynamic program analysis, mutation analysis, mobile security, and mining software repositories. His research in the area of software engineering won several ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, and he develops research infrastructure (e.g., Defects4J and the Major mutation framework) that is widely used by others. |