Keynote Programs Determined by Mutation-Adequate tests

This talk explores the motivation behind mutation as a “data coverage” idea parallel to the usual control-flow-coverage testing. In this view, to kill arithmetic-expression mutants requires a spread of test data, and that data then “covers” the expression. This idea originated about 1970 in partial-recursive function theory, in a study of execution traces that determine the function a program computes. By extension, the mutation-adequate test set determines the only possible program with those traces.