MUTATION 2020
The 15th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis
Porto, Portugal - Co-located with ICST
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Mutation 2020 has been postponed to 24 October in Porto. Further details here.
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About Mutation 2020

Mutation is widely acknowledged as one of the most important techniques to assess the fault-revealing ability of tests. In recent years, mutation has gained popularity both in academia and research, with several companies and research projects attempting to incorporate mutation to the development life cycle. Mutation analysis has traditionally targeted the source code but has also been successfully applied to various artefacts at different levels of abstraction. Examples of such artefacts include: database schemas, finite state machines, various model notations, security policies, software product lines, etc. Mutation has also been employed to solve various research problems including the Test Oracle Problem, Fault Localisation and Debugging, Defect Prediction, etc. To this day, the mutation field continues to expand with an increasing trend of high quality publications.

Mutation 2020 is the 15th in the series of international workshops focusing on mutation analysis. The workshop will be co-located with the 13th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation (ICST 2020). Accepted papers will be published as part of the ICST proceedings.

The Mutation workshop aims to be the premier forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss recent advances in the area and propose new research directions. We invite submissions of both full-length and short-length research papers and especially encourage the submission of industry practice papers.


Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Mutation is widely acknowledged as one of the most important techniques to assess the quality of tests. In recent years, mutation has gained popularity both in academia and research, with several companies and research projects attempting to incorporate mutation to the development life cycle. Mutation analysis has traditionally targeted the source code but has also been successfully applied to various artefacts at different levels of abstraction. Examples of such artefacts include: database schemas, finite state machines, various model notations, security policies, software product lines, etc. Mutation has also been employed to solve various research problems including the Test Oracle Problem, Fault Localisation and Debugging, Defect Prediction, etc. To this day, the mutation field continues to expand with an increasing trend of high quality publications. The Mutation workshop aims to be the premier forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss recent advances in the area and propose new research directions. We invite submissions of both full-length and short-length research papers and especially encourage the submission of industry practice papers.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Mutation-based test adequacy criteria (theoretical analyses and practical applications).
  • Mutation-based test data generation.
  • Higher order mutation testing.
  • Novel mutation testing paradigms and applications.
  • Novel solutions to mutation's problems.
  • Empirical studies using and/or evaluating mutation.
  • Theoretical analysis of mutation testing.
  • Mutation testing tools.
  • Industrial experience and application of mutation testing.
  • Mutation for mobile, internet, and cloud-based systems (QoS, power consumption, etc).
  • Mutation for non-functional properties, including security, reliability, performance, etc.
  • Mutation for artificial intelligence (e.g., data mutation, model mutation, mutation-based test data generation, etc.)

Types of Submissions

Three types of papers can be submitted to the workshop:

  • Full papers (10 pages): Research, case studies.
  • Short papers (6 pages): Research in progress, tools.
  • Industrial papers (6 pages): Applications and lessons learned in industry.
  • Poster papers (2 pages): Reseach in progress, tools, problem descriptions, new ideas.

Each paper must conform to the two columns IEEE conference publication format and must be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. Submissions will be evaluated according to the relevance and originality of the work and to their ability to generate discussions between the participants of the workshop. Three reviewers will review each paper and all the accepted papers will be published as part of the ICST proceedings.

Important Dates

  • Submission of abstracts: December 16th, 2019
  • Submission of full papers: December 30th, 2019 (updated)
  • Notification of acceptance: January 27th, 2020
  • Camera Ready: February 7tj, 2020
  • Workshop date: October 24th, 2020

Submission Site

Submissions will be handled via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mutation20.

Special Issue on Mutation Analysis and its Industrial Applications

We encourage authors of accepted papers to submit an extended version of their paper to a special issue on Mutation Analysis and its Industrial Applications published by the Journal of Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR).

Downloads: CfPpdf   CfPtxt

Organisation

Organisation

Program Chairs

Rahul Gopinath
CISPA, Saarland University
Jie M. Zhang
University College London

Program Committee

Jinhan Kim
KAIST (Korea)
Paul Ammann
George Mason Unversity (USA)
Lin Deng
Towson University (USA)
Gordon Fraser
Universität Passau (Germany)
Sudipto Ghosh
Colorado State University (USA)
Mark Harman
Facebook London (UK)
René Just
University of Washington (USA)
Birgitta Lindström
University of Skövde (Sweden)
Mike Papadakis
University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Kintis Marinos
Othera Eindhoven (Netherlands)
Goran Petrovic
Google Switzerland GmbH (Switzerland)
José Miguel Rojas
University of Leicester (UK)
Sina Shamshiri
The University of Sheffield (UK)
Donghwan Shin
University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Andy Zaidman
Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
Lingming Zhang
The University of Texas at Dallas (USA)
Qianqian Zhu
Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
Alex Denisov
ShiftLeft (Germany)
Giovani Guizzo
University College London (UK )
Thierry Titcheu Chekam
University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

Keynotes

Mike Papadakis

Professor of Software Engineering
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg

Program

Please find the recorded videos of the accepted papers here.

Summary of brainstorm discussion: Brainstormtxt   

(GMT+1 Time).

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12:40-13:05.

Warm Up.


13:05-13:15.

Welcome.


13:15-14:30.

Keynote: Commit-Aware Mutation Testing.


Dr. Mike Papadakis.

14:30-14:45.

On the impact of timeouts and JVM crashes in Pitest.


Thomas Laurent and Fionnuala Wall and Anthony Ventresque.

14:45-15:00.

Using mutation testing to measure behavioural test diversity.


Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto and Felix Dobslaw and Robert Feldt.

15:00-15:15.

Virtual coffee break.


15:15-15:30.

SiMut: Exploring Program Similarity to Support the Cost Reduction of Mutation Testing.


Alessandro Pizzoleto and Fabiano Ferrari and Lucas Dallilo and Jeff Offutt.

15:30-15:45.

Predicting Survived and Killed Mutants.


Alejandra Duque-Torres and Natia Doliashvili and Dietmar Pfahl and Rudolf Ramler.

15:45-16:00.

Fault Types of Adaptive and Context-Aware Systems and Their Relationship with Fault-based Testing Approaches.


Bento Rafael Siqueira and Fabiano Ferrari and Kathiani Elisa De Souza and Daniel San Martín and Valter Camargo.

16:00-16:15.

MutantDistiller: Using Symbolic Execution for Automatic Detection of Equivalent Mutants and Generation of Mutant Killing Tests.


Michael Baer and Norbert Oster and Michael Philippsen.

16:15-15:00.

An Approach to Identifying Minimal and Equivalent Mutants Based on Source Code Structure.


Claudinei Brito Junior and Rafael Serapilha Durelli and Vinícius Humberto Serapilha Durelli and Simone Rocio Senger Souza and AuriMarcelo Rizzo Vincenzi and Márcio Eduardo Delamaro.

15:00-16:45.

Virtual coffee break.


16:45-17:15.

Brainstorm on mutation analysis for new systems: Machine Learning Systems; Smart Contracts & Blockchain.


Community.

17:15-17:30.

Award presentation and wrap up.


Please vote for best presentation here. (The poll refreshes during each presentation. Hence, please vote before the next presentation.)

Registration

Please use the general ICST2020 registration site. Early bird registration available until February 11th, 2020.