Learning to Construct Better Mutation Faults

Abstract

Mutation faults are the core of mutation testing and have been widely used in many other software testing and debugging tasks. Hence, constructing high-quality mutation faults is critical. There are many traditional mutation techniques that construct syntactic mutation faults based on a limited set of manually-defined mutation operators. To improve them, the state-of-the-art deep-learning (DL) based technique (i.e., DeepMutation) has been proposed to construct mutation faults by learning from real faults via classic sequence-to-sequence neural machine translation (NMT). However, its performance is not satisfactory since it cannot ensure syntactic correctness of constructed mutation faults and suffers from the effectiveness issue due to the huge search space and limited features by simply treating each targeted method as a token stream.