Reductions of Operators in Java Mutation Testing

The objective of this chapter is to explore the reduction of computational costs of mutation testing of Java programs by selective mutations – omitting mutants generated for a mutation operator. The approaches to reduce the effort in mutation testing are briefly described. The idea of choosing a mutations operator and omitting mutants generated by it is described, next several experiments, conducted in the Eclipse environment using MuClipse and CodePro plugins, are presented in details. Two especially designed and implemented tools: Mutants Remover and Console Output Analyser were also used in experiments. Mutation score was used to evaluate the effectiveness of selective mutation testing.