Identifying Mutation Subsumption Relations

Abstract

One recent promising direction in reducing costs of mutation analysis is to identify redundant mutations. We propose a technique to discover redundant mutations by proving subsumption relations among method-level mutation operators using weak mutation testing. We conceive and encode a theory of subsumption relations in Z3 for 40 mutation targets (mutations of an expression or statement). Then we prove a number of subsumption relations using the Z3 theorem prover, and reduce the number of mutations in a number of mutation targets. MuJava-M includes some subsumption relations in MuJava. We apply MuJava and MuJava-M to 187 classes of 17 projects. Our approach correctly discards mutations in 74.97% of the cases, and reduces the number of mutations by 72.52%.