Aspect-oriented Response Injection: an Alternative to Classical Mutation Testing

Due to increasing importance of test cases in software development, there is a need to verify and assure their quality. Mutation testing is an effective technique of checking if tests react properly to changes by introducing alterations to the original source code. A mutant which survives all test cases indicates insufficient or inappropriate testing assertions. The most onerous disadvantage of this technique is considerable time required to generate, compile mutants and then execute test cases against each of them. In the paper we propose an aspect-oriented approach to generation and execution of mutants, called response injection, which excludes the need for separate compilation of every mutant.