Interface mutation: an interprocedural adequacy criterion for integration testing / Mutação de interface: um critério Interprocedimental para o teste de integração

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

1997

RESUMO

The project of test cases is one of the most important topics in the software testing activity. Several criteria have been proposed aiming at allowing the evaluation and selection of test cases in a systematic and theoretically well founded way. Unfortunately, the use of most of these criteria is restricted to the unit testing phase. For other testing phases, in particular for integration testing. there is a lack of such criteria, mainly because the existing criteria define test requirements only in the scope of a single unit. They arc not able to effectively exercise the interactions between units, what should be the focus of integration testing. Excepting some few works that extend structural criteria to the interprocedural level, only functional testing has been used at integration testing phase. Given this lack of criteria and the complementary characteristics of different testing techniques, this thesis presents an interprocedural fault based criterion named Interface Mutation. This criterion exercises the interactions between units through the selection of test cases that distinguish mutants created by introducing typical faults that characterize integration errors. A set of Interface Mutation operators was defined. The focus of these operators are the points of the program related to the unit interactions, for instance, subprogram calls and their parameters. Given the high cost associated to mutation testing in general and particularly to the Interface Mutation operators, it is necessary to define some approaches to reduce its application cost. Thus, some parameterizations were defined to the mutation operators, allowing to establish alternative Interface Mutation criteria, extending approaches already used in conventional mutation testing, as random mutation and constrained mutation. The application of any testing criterion strongly depends on its automatization. The definition of a criterion, without pointing out ways to its implementation has little practical utility. So, a tool named PROTEUM/IM was specified and implemented to support the application of Interface Mutation. This tool is an essential point in the present work because it allows the conduction of empirical studies aiming at evaluating the proposed criterion. Two case studies arc presented. In these studies the criterion Interface Mutation is applied to real programs and the cost of its application as well as its errors revealing effectiveness are evaluated. Alternative criteria are also used. Showing that Interface Mutation is very effective to reveal errors and can be applied with a reduced cost if used in an incremental way, taking advantage of the parameterization characteristics provided by the Interface Mutation operators set.

ASSUNTO(S)

teste de mutação interface mutation teste de integração integration testing mutation testing mutação de interface

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